Cinema: New Season

(See front cover)

Properly speaking, the cinema does not possess a “season.” Unlike legitimate theatres, the 14,000 cinemansions in the U. S. aim to keep their doors open at all times. Nonetheless, partly because it coincides with the actual release of the first pictures on the production schedules announced each June, the first half of August is generally regarded as the start of a new year in the cinema business. Last week half a dozen major pictures, in sharp distinction to the products from the bottom of last year’s barrel which have been unloaded on exhibitors for the past two months, were ready for the screen.

This week Paramount will release Cecil B. DeMille’s The Crusades; RKO will exhibit Alice Adams, starring Katharine Hepburn. Within the next month will appear Greta Garbo in Anna Karenina, Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers in Top Hat, Will Rogers in Steamboat Round the Bend, Marion Davies in Page Miss Glory. Last week the first “superspecial” picture of the new season enjoyed its premiere in Manhattan. This—advertised on billboards all over the U. S. for the past two months, starring Jean Harlow, Clark Gable & Wallace Beery, produced at a cost of $1,000,000—was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s China Seas.

China Seas, like an alarmingly large proportion of the cinemelodramas which have been produced in the U. S. since Grand Hotel, includes no change of scene. All the action takes place on, in or near a steamship called the Kin Lung, bound from Hongkong to Singapore. Experienced cinemaddicts need not be told who is on board the Kin Lung. It is the same hardy little group of characters who have been regularly encountered in railroad depots, country inns, trains, cross-country buses and every other public place except a comfort station for the past four years: the bad girl with the heart of gold; the dipsomaniac writer; the hero pining for his lost love who makes her appearance in time’s nick; the shady financier; the cuckold with his wife and her dishonest lover and all the rest. However, in China Seas this familiar crew has a new and entertaining bag of tricks to display.

China Doll (Jean Harlow), in defiance of the Legion of Decency, has apparently been the mistress of Captain Gaskell (Clark Gable) for six years. James MacArdle (Wallace Beery) is not a tycoon but a greasy, coastwise racketeer, aware that the Kin Lung carries a fat cargo of gold. McCaleb, the drunken novelist (Robert Benchley), insults his fellow passengers by misunderstanding them completely. High point of the story arrives when, having weathered a typhoon, the Kin Lung is attacked by Malay pirates who are in league with Racketeer MacArdle.

By the time the pirates reach her the Kin Lung is wallowing in a ferment of plots, counterplots, scandals and frustrations. Captain Gaskell has broken with China Doll to become engaged to Sybil (Rosalind Russell). China Doll, chagrined, has stolen his key to the ship’s armory, given it to MacArdle. The owner of the line (C. Aubrey Smith) has delivered a short talk on the lure of the Orient. During the typhoon a lashed steamroller has rolled loose on deck, crushing coolies until, owing to the cowardice of his third officer (Lewis Stone), Captain Gaskell is forced to rechain it almost singlehanded. When the pirates board the Kin Lung they first attach a Malay boot to Captain Gaskell’s right foot.* Says oily MacArdle: “Why, it’s breaking my heart to see you suffer like this. I can’t bear it. . . . Please tell them where it is. . . .” Then the pirates begin reaching into the ladies’ dresses for their jewels. Routed at last, when the disgraced third officer heroically redeems himself, the pirates disappear leaving the Kin Lung much better off than it was before. MacArdle is exposed as an amiable human rat. Captain Gaskell seems better disposed toward China Doll. The drunken novelist is sneering at the barkeep.

As an indication of what the winter of 1935-36 will hold for cinemaddicts, China Seas, a first rate melodrama, lively, funny, and convincing, is highly reassuring. Its popularity at its premiere last week seemed to presage box-office records and a banner year, as usual, for the most ingratiating member of its cast, Jean Harlow.

As the foremost U. S. embodiment of sex appeal, Jean Harlow’s chief qualifications are her hair and her good humor. Her hair brought her to the attention of Howard Hughes in 1929 and thus launched a career which has done more than any other one thing to keep beauty parlors busy through Depression. Her humor, overlooked by Hughes, was recognized by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to whom he sold her contract for $60,000. Since Theda Bara retired, sex appeal on the U. S. screen has been a quality largely identified with comedy. Beginning with Red Headed Woman and continuing with Red Dust, Dinner at Eight and Bombshell, Jean Harlow has paradoxically made herself a symbol for the kind of allure which her appearance naturally suggests by ridiculing it. She was blithely hailed as a femme fatale until the suicide of her second husband, Paul Bern, made this designation seem shockingly impolite. Since then, fan magazines have shifted their viewpoint and painted “the real Jean Harlow” as a cross between a camp cook and an English sheepdog, notable mainly for her skill in making salad dressings and the difficulty she experiences with shampoos. All this is obviously rubbish, the more inexcusable since it is clearly contradicted by the facts of her career.

Dentist’s Daughter. Jean Harlow was born in Kansas City in 1911. Her father, an easy-going dentist named Monte Carpenter, lives there now, still practicing his profession. Her mother, who still calls her daughter “Baby” and whose executive ability has been the most significant influence in Jean Harlow’s life, divorced Dentist Carpenter and remarried. Her second husband was a sombre Latin named Marino Bello. Mrs. Bello’s maiden name had been Jean Harlow. She had always wanted to be an actress. She had made a trip to Hollywood when her daughter Harlean Carpenter was a little girl. As Harlean grew up, it became apparent that her appearance might be of value to the cinema industry. Mrs. Bello began to see that her dreams for her own career might finally be realized vicariously. After Harlean Carpenter’s first and unsuccessful marriage at 16 to a rich young broker named Charles McGrew, the Bellos descended on Hollywood in 1928 and Harlean began to get jobs as an extra, using her mother’s maiden name.

On Mrs. Bello’s first trip to the Coast, she had learned that in Hollywood it did not matter who you were but who you seemed to be. Instead of an apartment or a bungalow, the Bellos lived in a house which had two floors. In it they gave parties to which they invited the people Jean met on the sets. Unlike other extras, Jean drove to work with her mother in their own car. This was a limousine, old but well-polished. At the wheel sat a smart driver whose trim clothes and foreign air helped confirm the impression that Jean was a rich society girl in pictures for a lark. Extras without carfare gaped as Mrs. Bello and Jean entered the lot in their fine conveyance, might have opened their mouths for another purpose if they had known the identity of the trim driver. He was Mr. Marino Bello.

In 1929, the cinema industry was in a state of more than usual confusion. Warner Brothers had just proved that the screen could talk. Howard Hughes, who had just spent $2,000,000 making a silent picture called Hell’s Angels, was preparing to spend $1,000,000 more remaking it with sound. Because Greta Nissen, who played the silent lead, had the thickest Swedish accent in California, she had to be replaced. Ben Lyon, playing the hero, had noticed Jean Harlow on the set and recommended her to Producer Hughes. After a glance at the Harlow hair and a brief study of the Harlow frame, Producer Hughes caused his press agent to coin the phrase “platinum blonde” and his costumer to design the lowest cut evening gown ever photographed. The climax of Hell’s Angels was reached, not in the million dollar uproar of 90 airplanes, but when Jean Harlow appeared in her evening dress and said: “Do you mind if I slip into something more comfortable?”

“Christ”; Bed Reader. When Howard Hughes sold Jean Harlow to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, it helped to ripen her friendship with Paul Bern, one of MGM’s ablest associate producers. Handsome, slender, melancholy, brilliant and distinguished by his profound sympathy for other people’s troubles, Paul Bern was called by his friends “a motion picture Christ.” The phrase had no wide currency until Labor Day, 1932—the day, two months after his marriage to Jean Harlow, that Paul Bern was found naked in his bathroom, face down and dead, with a bullet in his brain. His friends might have assumed that Jean Harlow had caused Bern’s suicide had not his common-law wife brought herself to their attention two days later by jumping off a boat in the Sacramento River. This made it possible for Jean Harlow to forget her sorrow in the pursuit of her career. She did so well that a year later she married once more, this time to a jolly cameraman named Harold Rosson. The spirit of camaraderie which had sprung up between Photographer Rosson and Actress Harlow on the set was instrumental in making the termination of their brief alliance a happy contrast to the one that had preceded it. They were divorced in 1934, because Photographer Rosson annoyed the epitome of U. S. sex appeal by reading when he went to bed.

Off Stage. In private life, Jean Harlow still lives with her mother and the mysterious Marino Bello, now the owner of some mines to which he is usually just going or from which he has just returned. Besides playing golf, Jean Harlow likes swimming which she does every day in her own pool and a parlor game called “Murder Mystery” in which whoever is “it” mentally constructs a crime which the other players try to solve by asking questions in turn. Because a smudge of dust is as visible on her hair as a thumbprint on white paper, she visits her hairdresser once a day for a shampoo. She dresses quickly, uses few cosmetics because they irritate her skin. In the large Bello house at Bel Air many of the rooms are white, as are Jean Harlow’s bathing suits and most of the fantastic clothes designed for her by MGM’s Costumer Adrian, who is well aware of the fact that fine feathers make fine fans at the box office. When not working, Jean Harlow dresses like a majority of Hollywood actresses, in slacks and blouse. In place of the Bello limousine, she now arrives at the studio for work in a Cadillac V 12, tastefully hung with Hollywood Fire Department signs.

Since the collapse of her marriage with Hal Rosson, Jean Harlow has been involved in neither romance nor scandal. Currently, her most frequent escort is Actor William Powell, who ferried her about the lot in his car when she was making China Seas. She enjoys giving away money which she does on an incredibly large scale. She has a habit of speaking of herself in the third person which seems to confirm her mother’s impression that the cinema star, Jean Harlow, is their joint creation. Mrs. Bello still stage-manages the Harlow menage.

If there is any fly in the scented ointment of Jean Harlow’s current celebrity, it is her occasional dissatisfaction with the character which her appearance and her mother, by a sort of conspiracy of nature and circumstance, have built up for her. Her determination to achieve a form of self-expression distinct from the one she has achieved on the screen shows itself in different ways. For her game of “Murder Mystery,” she prefers writers as opponents, as she believes they think up the best crimes. She herself wants to write and spent last year completing a novel called Today is Tonight which has not yet gone to a publisher. Well aware of the part that decolletage has played in her career, she also knows that the personal accomplishment which Hollywood prizes above all others is wit and it distresses her sometimes to find that, however invaluable her sense of the comic may be on the screen, she rarely gets credit for it elsewhere.

Last week at a party, when she made what she considered a bright remark, the person to whom she was speaking asked: “Who did you hear say that?” Jean Harlow paused bitterly before making another remark which was both brighter and indubitably her own: “My God, must I always wear a low-cut dress to be important?”

The Farmer Takes a Wife (Fox). If cinema producers ever learn to use color without giving the impression that they consider it a Holly wood invention this is the sort of picture which it will most notably enhance. However, even in black & white, The Farmer Takes a Wife is easily an improvement, in scope and movement, upon the play, based on Walter D. Edmond’s novel Rome Hani, from which Edwin Burke derived it. Essentially, it is less a story than the portrait of a place and a period—the Erie Canal, a quarter of a century after it was opened in 1825. To shrewd observers, it was even then apparent that the canal, as the main freight route between the Midwest and the sea, was doomed by the railroads.

The Erie boaters, for whom the “canawl” was a way of life as well as a waterway, preferred to ignore this threat to a picaresque existence which was the more pleasant because it was so leisurely, the more adventurous because it contrasted so sharply with the sleepy green countryside through which the horses pulled the boats. Against a detailed and wholly charming background, made up of boaters’ quarrels and friendships, their odd songs and foolish curses, their contempt for hogs as cargo, their obstreperous pride in getting drunk and having fights, the picture outlines an incident which fits perfectly into the nostalgic mood which its surroundings have produced. It is the surprisingly touching story of a farm boy (Henry Fonda), working as a boater because he wants money to buy land, and a girl (Janet Gaynor) who finds it difficult though not impossible to love a man who does not worship the canal where she has been born & bred.

Not much happens in The Farmer Takes a Wife. The things that do—Molly Larkins’ failure to get her preserves entered for competition in the Oneida Fair; Dan Harrow’s fight with the canal bully (Charles Bickford)—perhaps convey the picture’s flavor less satisfactorily than a speech by Dan’s friend, Fortune Friendly (Slim Summerville), boater, philosopher, gossip and amateur dentist. At Molly’s request, because of the effect that she hopes it will have on Dan, he tells about the gala ceremonies that attended the opening of the canal: “There were cannon strung out all along the canal and the minute the water began to come in from Lake Erie, the guns went off one by one all the way to New York. They had the news there in 80 minutes. . . . The first barge carried a keg with the American eagle painted on it, and in it was water from Lake Erie to be .emptied in New York Bay. It was quite a sight to see. . . .” Cinemaddicts who see The Fanner Takes a Wife are likely to agree.

Jalna (RKO). Without formal plot construction, the purpose of this almost aggressively quiet picture may elude the cinemaddict until his senses become sharp enough to realize that he is seeing unfolded, not a story, but the portrait of a family. Mazo de la Roche’s prize Atlantic Monthly novel was not easy to screen. It propounded two difficult requirements— literate adaptation and perfect casting. Producer Kenneth MacGowan met both successfully. Gran (Jessie Ralph), about to celebrate her 100th birthday, is the hub around which the Whiteoaks revolve in their Ontario fastness—serious Renny (Ian Hunter), impressive Nicholas (C. Aubrey Smith), practical Piers (Theodore Newton) and adolescent Finch (George Offerman Jr.). When Sonnet-Scribbler Eden (David Manners) brings home a bride (Kay Johnson) amid Gran’s yells, the screams of the Jalna parrot and the barking of dogs, Piers steals his thunder by appearing with a bride of his own (Molly Lamont). Action consists of the initiation of the two women into the rituals of the eccentric clan, reactions which for Eden’s wife involve a new love, and for Piers’s wife a momentary and quickly corrected rebellion.

The best tribute to Jalna’s success in establishing a mood is the sense one has at the end of the atmosphere of the house, momentarily agitated by the life pangs of a new generation, settling again over its people like ‘an unshining heavy fluid: births, deaths, anniversaries; Gran, at her centenary, demanding a candle to grow on, tasting the punch, tiring of lace caps, lumbering into the Buick (“We’ve got to get a bigger car”), starting the Jalna Christmas song (Ring Merrily Bells, Ding Dong), preparing to say with a leer to some new, as yet un-jalna-ed woman: “You’ve a bonny body, well covered but not too plump—just right for a bride.”

* The “boot,” onetime official torture in China and Japan to extract confessions from thieves, is a contraption of boards which fits over the victim’s foot, screws together like a vise to crunch his bones.