Cinema: The New Pictures: Mar. 8, 1937

Penrod & Sam (Warner). Even the audience which did not read Booth Tarkington’s Penrod stories when they were the same age as the protagonists will catch some of the backyard necromancy of their childhood in this latter-day version of a Penrod sequel. To the audience which is reading them now, the greatest picture ever made would come out second-best to Penrod & Sam if coupled with it on a double bill. The plot contains more Warner Bros, than Tarkington, but the liberties do not affect the characters which, in the persons of the amazing children with which Hollywood swarms these days, are Tarkington silhouets made three-dimensional.

Penrod (Billy Mauch) is chief of a private G-man organization, Sam (Harry Watson) his trusty right-hand man. At first Penrod’s life is complicated only by the trouble he is always getting into by his scraps with mean, ‘fraid-cat Rodney Bitts (Jackie Morrow), the son of his dad’s boss. Sent upstairs supperless, Penrod gets out of a whipping by swearing in his dad as a junior G-man. When a gang of crooks holds up the town bank and shoots a colored woman, mother of Penrod’s friend and fellow G-man Verman (Phillip Hurlic, the junior G-men throw their efforts on the side of the law. As dramaturgy, the device of having Bank-robber Hanson (Craig Reynolds; and associates take refuge in the barn which is G-man headquarters, may smack of the coincidental; as fantasy, it blends properly with the hayloft fantasies of the Penrod age. Helped by the local constabulary, the kids round up the yeggs. Blackamoor Verman finds a new home, Penrod’s dad makes peace with Banker Bitts. Billy Mauch is the boy who played the young Anthony Adverse. He has an equally talented twin, Bobby Mauch, whose mother, according to Hollywood legend, cannot tell them apart. The Mauches will play the dual leads in Warner’s forthcoming The Prince & the Pauper. Best shot: Verman telling what he saw in the barn.

Lost Horizon (Columbia). As soon as Director Frank Capra read James Hilton’s prizewinning, million-copy novel, he wanted to screen it. He says: “The story had bigness. It held a mirror up to the thoughts of every human being on earth.”

Director Capra went to work with typical Hollywood opulence. He bought the original manuscript, gave it to Scenarist Robert Riskin to rework, devised one of the most magnificent sets in cinema history. He had the good judgment to leave the story almost exactly as it was written and the skill to match Author Hilton’s verbal talent with pictorial subtlety. After this week’s opening, most critics held Lost Horizon as fine a cinema as it is a book. Its one flaw is Director Capra’s one major deviation from the novel—a happy ending.

Lost Horizon is half mysticism, half adventure. Caught in a Chinese rebellion in remote Baskul, Robert Conway (Ronald Colman), philosophical writer and man of action whose work for the British Foreign Office in the Orient has made him next choice for Foreign Secretary, busily tends to shipping 90 Europeans away in a flock of planes. He boards the last one with his brother (John Howard), a fugitive stock-manipulator (Thomas Mitchell), a fossil-hunter (Edward Everett Horton) and a tuberculous tart (Isabel Jewell). Next morning they find the plane is going in the wrong direction, realize that they have been kidnapped when the pilot turns out to be an unknown Oriental who keeps them at bay with a pistol. Deep in the mountains of Tibet, the plane runs out of gas, crashes. The passengers are unhurt, but the pilot dies. Freezing, hungry, lost, the five bewildered people have resigned themselves to death when a party of natives suddenly appears, headed by a suave Oriental named Chang (H. B. Warner) who speaks perfect English. He guides them through a blizzard over a perilous trail to a cleft in the peaks behind which lies an incredible gardenspot called the Valley of the Blue Moon, fertile, warm, beautiful, and dominated by the huge white lamasery of Shangri-La.

Installed in luxurious quarters, the five are given every courtesy, but soon realize that they are prisoners. Conway does not mind, for he falls in love with a strange girl named Sondra (Jane Wyatt). Presently he is called to see the High Lama (Sam Jaffe), who explains that he found the valley some 200 years before and has worked out a formula for living which eliminates struggle, emphasizes beauty and peace. As a result everyone is happy and lives to a great age. The Lama says he is 250 and is now at last going to die. Impressed by Conway’s philosophical books, he has kidnapped him to ask him to become the next High Lama, guard the future of Shangri-La, which is destined to be the font of a “new life” when the strife-torn outer world destroys itself.

Conway swallows this fantastic tale, decides to stay. Three of his companions, have found new peace, agree. But Conway’s impetuous, moody brother rebels, plots escape with Maria (Margo), a Russian girl who looks 20 but, according to Chang, is actually 66. If she leaves the mystic Valley, Chang explains, she will speedily look her age. When Maria denies all this, asserts that Chang and the High Lama are both crazy, Conway’s faith is shaken. He agrees to sneak away with Maria, his brother and a party of bribed porters. As the High Lama’s torchlit funeral procession winds across the lamasery, they flee into the cold. Days later, still high in the snowy Himalayas, the porters are killed by an avalanche. Maria faints, has to be carried. When they put her down that night, her face is that of a wrinkled hag.

Driven mad, Conway’s brother jumps off a cliff. Conway staggers blindly to a native village, suffering total amnesia. Found by British agents, he is on the way home when his memory returns. He runs away in a desperate search for Shangri-La Here the book ended and here the picture should have ended—with noblemen in London drinking a toast: “To Robert Conway. May he find his Shangri-La. May we all find our Shangri-La!”

Love Is News (Twentieth Century-Fox). News it is when Hollywood conceives a clever angle to one of the most hackneyed of plots—the triangle of heiress, reporter and city editor. The heiress here is Tony Gateson (Loretta Young), whose romantic escapades are prime newspaper fodder. Crack reporter Steve Leyton (Tyrone Power Jr.) of the Daily Express has made particular hay of them. When he tricks Miss Gateson into an interview about her titled fiancé, she determines to turn the tables. Unbeknownst to Steve, she tells all the other newshawks that she is marrying “Stevie-kins,” will settle $1,000,000 on him.

Steve is then on the toasting fork. His own paper, scooped, fires him. The other papers refuse to believe his denial. When he tries to get even with the mocking heiress by giving the Daily Express a story about her, Managing Editor Canavan (Don Ameche) punches his jaw. Meanwhile, salesmen and autograph-hounds make his life hideous. With vast delight, Miss Gateson continues to taunt him, keeps one jump ahead in a long series of mutual double-crosses. When he gets her into jail, she tricks him into the next cell. When he offers her one puff of their only cigaret, she bites his finger, gets the whole smoke. Only time he wins out is when she fakes an automobile crash. Finding her draped fetchingly across the wreckage, he sees through her pose, drops her in a mud puddle. Eventually, of course, they fall in love.

The excellence of this fresh, frothy yarn is nicely paralleled by the performances of its two chief characters. Acting with a kittenish zest precisely suited to her appearance, Loretta Young does a job as good as any in her long career. Tyrone Power Jr., in his second important role and his screen debut in farce, gives surprisingly mature restraint to a role which might easily have slipped into frantic mugging.

Tyrone Power Jr., Twentieth Century’s rival to MGM’s Robert Taylor and Warner’s Errol Flynn as a new male star, was born in May 1914. Until March that year his mother, Patia Power, was working with his famed father, Tyrone, in Shakespearean stock. When he was 2, Tyrone Jr. went to see his father as Junipero Serra in John Steven McGroarty’s annual mission play at San Gabriel, Calif. At 7 he played Pablo, a monastery neophyte in the same play. While his father toured in Shakespeare he lived with his mother in San Diego. Back in Cincinnati, finishing Purcell High, he played the lead in the class play, Officer 666, worked after school jerking sodas and ushering in the Orpheum. Family arguments whether he should go to college or learn acting ended in 1931 with his father taking him up to Canada to fish and get some sound Shakespearean coaching. Young Tyrone’s first professional appearance was in The Merchant of Venice. He played an old man, friend of the Doge. One night a huge costume knife slipped out of the hand of Shylock (Fritz Leiber), stuck in the scenery beside Tyrone’s head. Muttered Tyrone Sr., “You’re not hurt, boy. Keep on playing.”

In 1931, Father Tyrone at work in The Miracle Man collapsed, died that night. Tyrone Junior started trailing around casting offices. Older actors liked to sit around their dressing rooms and gossip with the skinny, hollow-cheeked boy about the time they saw his father in Julius Caesar, Chu Chin Chow or The Rivals. A friend of his father’s, Screen Writer Arthur Caesar, boarded him for a while. Power repaid him by driving the Caesar Lincoln around Hollywood while his host peddled stories. He got no parts. Desperate, he went back to New York where Michael Strange, onetime wife of John Barrymore, let him use the guest room. Helen Menken asked Guthrie McClintic to give him an interview. That season Power understudied Burgess Meredith, Katharine Cornell’s leading man. Next year. Producer Darryl Zanuck tested him, gave him a little part in Girls’ Dormitory, a larger one in Ladies in Love, then, with characteristic willingness to gamble on his hunches, cast this unknown, lanky actor as the lead in a million-dollar production, Lloyd’s of London.

Power is six feet tall, weighs 155 lb., is superstitious about whistling in his dressing room. Like many sensitive young actors, he makes an intelligent effort to keep up on artistic matters, likes to discuss literature and painting.

In the campaign to make him better known, he has submitted meekly to numerous publicity romances. He usually eats lunch with his leading lady, likes swimming and playing tennis, drives a black Cord phaeton.

Maid of Salem (Paramount). Witchcraft hysteria in Massachusetts in 1692 offered a tough problem for the talents of Director Frank Lloyd and Producer Howard Estabrook. As realism, the episode could obviously be organized into a dramaturgical case history of religious obsession, ignorance, superstition and sex starvation finding an outlet in communal sadism. No less obviously, such treatment would not be stuff with which a U. S. audience could while away a pleasant evening. Messrs. Lloyd & Estabrook steered round the difficulty by injecting romance in the person of young Roger Coverman (Fred MacMurray), a political fugitive from Virginia, whose attentions to Barbara Clarke (Claudette Colbert) got her into trouble with the Puritan authorities, but who arrived on horseback in time to save her from the noose on Gallows Hill. As entertainment, the results are ambiguous. The background of deep human impulses twisted awry and howling to the moon for blood makes the cloak-&-sword romance seem as shallow as a courtier’s wit. Conversely, the conventional showmanship weakens the tract against bigotry. What emerges is diluted to a lurid page of colonial history.

Tituba, a Negro servant (Madame Sul-Te-Wan), gets the Massachusetts housewives thinking about witches when she tells of devil dances she has witnessed in the jungle. Her tales excite a nervous child, Ann (Bonita Granville). who is punished for having a stolen book on witches. Ann gets even with Tituba by pretending to be bewitched. Then Ann’s mother testifies that Tituba bewitched her too. Soon the folk begin to find the charge of witchcraft handy for paying off grudges. Once roaring on its way, the hysteria veers round to Barbara when she temerously defends an accused person, gains substantiation when Tim Clarke, her cousin, testifies that when he saw her with somebody she said she was with “no man,” a statement which the listeners take to mean that she was with Beelzebub. After that only Roger’s opportune horseback arrival could possibly save her life. In spite of valiant effort by a harassed cast, the dialog is of the prithee and methinks kind and never gets the strophe of real human talk. MacMurray, heretofore a trade emblem of flip 20th-century youth, invents a kind of brogue which fails to transport him back two centuries and a half. Best shots: careful and authentic reproductions of colonial candle-dripping, house-raising parties, medical methods.