Cinema: The New Pictures: Mar. 4, 1935

One More Spring (Fox) deals with three Manhattan victims of Depression who, instead of resorting to the bread lines, take up their residence in a Central Park tool shed. One is a furniture dealer (Warner Baxter) whose sole reminder of previous affluence is a gigantic antique bed. One is a violinist (Walter King), who finds himself humiliated in his efforts to practice in public by kindly passersby who mistake him for a street musician. The third is a demure actress (Janet Gaynor) who meets the furniture dealer when both are trying to filch a supper from the open kitchen windows of the Central Park Casino.

In their tool shed, the three contrive not only to keep body and soul comfortably together but also to exemplify the Golden Rule. The violinist gives lessons to a street cleaner whose life ambition is to learn to play “Macushla” on the fiddle. The furniture dealer rescues a despondent banker who is trying to commit suicide by plunging into a pond. The actress keeps house for them and is dejected only when the furniture dealer wears a shirt she has not had time to iron. By the time the picture ends, the violinist has a job, the street cleaner knows his tune, the banker is about to reward the other two according to their deserts.

Derived from a novel by Robert Nathan, this picture lacks the satirical implications of its original but somehow achieves a simple and disarming charm which is likely to prove valuable at the boxoffice. A delicate and sympathetic, if somewhat disingenuous, reflection of the funny side of the Depression, it rates high in the scale of recreation-ground cinema, well above Central Park, a small notch below Zoo in Budapest. Good shot: a zoo attendant (Stepin Fetchit) advertising to the furniture dealer the excellence of the meat he feeds the lions.

Sweet Music (Warner) is Rudy Vallee’s most successful venture into cinema. Perceiving that the flaw in his previous productions was the fact that they required him to act, the authors of this one carefully made its hero, Skip Houston, a complimentary portrait of Vallee himself. Consequently, between songs, he is required to do little more than give an imitation of himself which he contrives to do successfully by smiling in a vacuous way and speaking in a low, bland monotone.

Since this achievement could scarcely be considered a well-rounded evening’s entertainment even by Crooner Vallee’s most fervent admirers, Sweet Music contains other ingredients. The story investigates Skip Houston’s mismanaged romance with a Chicago tap-dancer (Ann Dvorak). Through it scrambles a host of entertaining minor characters impersonated by a quorum of Warner Brothers’ large roster of comedians, notably Ned Sparks, as the dancer’s irascible manager, and Allen Jenkins, as Skip Houston’s pressagent. Alice White, as a scatterbrained chorus girl, does the best acting in the picture. Of Sweet Music’s 80 minutes, 20 are occupied by Vallee singing. Best of its six songs are “Good Green Acres of Home,” “Fare Thee Well, Annabelle.”

Night Life of the Gods (Universal), directed by the late Lowell Sherman, is an adaptation of the novel in which the late Thorne Smith played with the idea of a scientist who discovered how to turn humans into stone and statues into people, used his trick to revive a group of mythological effigies in a museum of art. Out of respect for the Legion of Decency, Director Sherman and his associates were compelled to clip their wings in following some of Author Smith’s imaginative flights. Obviously on the screen it was impossible to have the gods and goddesses visit a Broadway department store completely naked.

In general, though, they stuck closely to the spirit of an original which has been widely, if not wisely, admired for its daring fantasy. The picture contains a scene in which Neptune uses his trident to frighten the patrons of a deluxe Manhattan swimming pool, an episode in which Bacchus finds modern whiskey so fiery it makes him belch, a passage in which Hebe discovers a container full of paper cups. Alan Mowbray plays the inventor with admirable presence of mind. Meg, the stone girl who becomes his accomplice when he converts her into flesh & blood, is Florine McKinney. Typical shot: Venus de Milo experimenting with a pair of arms.

After Office Hours (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). When she enters the combined boathouse, garage, workshop, countryseat and rendezvous maintained by the villain of this picture, Sharon Norwood (Constance Bennett) is favorably impressed. She casts a glance at her surroundings and says to her host: “Nice, nice, nice.”

This odd locution would seem more startling were not the other characters in After Office Hours equally freakish in their mannerisms. The hero, Jim Branch (Clark Gable), is a managing editor who, for no apparent reason, wears a pencil in his derby. The villain (Harvey Stephens) is not only a playboy, adulterer, champion sculler and murderer, but also a candidate for Senator. Sharon Norwood’s mother (Billie Burke) makes sandwiches at midnight and talks like a lunatic. To cinemaddicts familiar with the strange symbolism of the medium, these quaint absurdities immediately indicate that After Office Hours treats of high life and are intended to make less implausible by contrast a wandering plot in which Jim Branch saves Sharon from an entanglement with the would-be Senator by getting the facts to show that he killed his onetime mistress.

After Office Hours includes, in addition to the sinister cottage, handsome Cedric Gibbons interiors of a Park Avenue apartment, a publisher’s office and a waterfront cabaret. It gives Constance Bennett a chance to pose in four different evening gowns and to prove, superfluously, that she is still the most affected young woman on the U. S. screen. Likely to be popular, because of its stars and a rapid-fire style in which Director Robert Leonard shows the influence of Frank Capra, After Office Hours contains one genuinely comic sequence: a lunchroom proprietor (Henry Armetta) working himself into a slow rage when his patrons comment disdainfully on his taste in radio entertainment.

Folies Bergere de Paris (Twentieth Century). Believing that the title, plot and star of this picture would make it especially acceptable to French audiences, Producer Darryl Zanuck did more than “dub in” French dialog. Folies Bergere was made twice, once in English, once in French. The French version of each scene was made immediately after the English one, on the same set. Maurice Chevalier is the only performer who appears in both versions. The French one, in which the leading lady is Princess Paley, includes a tableau of nude models, jokes which would alarm the Legion of Decency.

While U. S. audiences are likely to doubt whether Folies Bergere, derived from a minor Hungarian play called The Red Cat (TIME, Oct. 1), justified such elaborate preparations, they are likely to find it an agreeable and handsomely arranged example of its type. Between the big “production numbers” at the start and finish, it sandwiches in a brisk little backstage-&-bedroom farce based on the resemblance of a song-&-dance man in the “Folies Bergere” to a celebrated financier.

The dancer impersonates the financier first in his act and later—when business conditions make it imperative for the financier to be in two places at once—in the financier’s home. In addition to making it possible for Maurice Chevalier to appear on the screen in almost every sequence, this arrangement also allows him to have two leading ladies—Ann Sothern, as the music-hall comedian’s jealous mistress: slant-eyed Merle Oberon as the financier’s mischievous wife. If the suspense of wondering whether the financier knows whether his wife knows who was making love to her in her boudoir fails to keep the audience alert, this is also an advantage: it makes the more welcome those interruptions in which Chevalier, as gay and ingratiating as usual, goes into his songs. Good bets for radio include: “Rhythm of the Rain,” “I Was Lucky,” “Singing a Happy Song.”