Cinema: The New Pictures: Jun. 7, 1937

I Met Him in Paris (Paramount) mine the photographically rich vein of winter sports which, extensively explored by European producers, has heretofore been neglected by Hollywood. On her first trip abroad, in flight from a tedious suitor in New York, Fashion Designer Kay Denham (Claudette Colbert) picks up two personable Americans in a Paris bar. One is Gene Anders (Robert Young) who hoping to gratify his inclination for casual romance, suggests a trip to Switzerland. The other is his friend George Potter (Melvyn Douglas) who, also in love with Kay and aware that Gene already has a wife, joins the junket as chaperon. In Switzerland Kay and her companions have time to try everything from fancy skating, for which Claudette Colbert reveals unsuspected talent, to falling off a bob-sled at 60 m.p.h., before Gene’s wife (Mona Barrie) appears at the ice bar of the Hotel St. Georg. This disrupts their holiday, forces Kay, back in Paris where her U. S. admirer has followed her, to decide which one of her suitors she will marry.

In the amusing story by Helen Meinardi on which I Met Him in Paris is based, the Swiss interlude was a minor incident. Adroitly magnified in Claude Binyon’s adaptation, it covers the subject of playing in the snow as thoroughly as an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, and to much better effect as entertainment. For the huge white panels of snow-covered mountains against which the Swiss sequences in the story are outlined by the camera, Director Wesley Ruggles took his whole cast and crew of 250 not to the Alps but to Sun Valley. Idaho. There, in a fold of the hills eleven miles from Union Pacific’s famed new Sun Valley Lodge, he built an exact duplicate of a Swiss village, including an outdoor skating rink.

Brilliantly photographed by Lee Tover, shrewdly released to coincide with the first heat waves of 1937, the $1,000.000 result successfully combines the current vogue for mildly lunatic comedy with the pure visual satisfaction of importations like Du World’s The Bine Light, H. R. Sokal’s Slalom. Best small part: George Davis as a Swiss sleigh driver who, with the same impenetrable calm, drives Kay to the hotel when she arrives, rescues her when she plunges into a snowbank on skis, drives her to the station when she leaves.

This Is My Affair (Twentieth Century-Fox) is an engaging specimen of period cinema, dealing with a turn-of-the-century G-Man. Lieutenant Richard L. Perry (Robert Taylor) is secretly assigned by President McKinley to investigate the operations of a band of Midwest bank-robbers whose uncanny efficiency suggests that they are in league with Government officials. Lieutenant Perry gets off to a flying start by falling in love with the gang’s most eligible female member, Lil Duryea (Barbara Stanwyck) and is on the way to a brilliant solution of the case when President McKinley is shot, leaving Perry with no proof that he is a Government agent. Getting Perry out of jail entails the assistance not only of Lil but also of President Theodore Roosevelt and Admiral Dewey, who rescue him by means of an old-fashioned telephone.

Producer Darryl Zanuck’s interest in history generally and the U. S. gaslight era particularly is by no means pedantic. Nonetheless, if nothing that happens in This Is My Affair, from Lieutenant Perry’s correspondence with McKinley to the scandal which he unearths, can be readily substantiated, the background of everything that happens in the picture has a carefully documented and persuasive authenticity. Far more successful than Robert Taylor’s rigidly uninspired performance as the hero are those of Robert McWade, Frank Conroy and Sidney Blackmer respectively as Dewey, McKinley and Roosevelt I. Good shot: Roosevelt polishing up his phrase about the Big Stick*at a Cabinet meeting, which he leaves to “go for a ride with Alice.”

Pick a Star (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) slapsticks the story of the sweet young girl who makes good in Hollywood. In Waterloo, Kans., pretty Cecilia Moore (Rosina Lawrence) wins a beauty contest managed by her boy friend Joe Jenkins (Jack Haley) only to find that the prize money has been stolen. Chagrined to see her humiliated, Joe journeys to Hollywood to try to land her a film job. But the forced landing of an American Airlines plane at Waterloo gives screenstruck Cecilia her chance to meet Cinemactor Rinaldo Lopez (Mischa Auer), fly out to the Coast with him and her noisy sister Nellie (Patsy Kelly).

In Hollywood, Producer Hal Roach (Our Gang comedies) has arranged a string of Hollywood scenes calculated to spotlight Haley and Kelly in their inoffensive cutups. Taken to a nightclub by Lopez, Cecilia and Nellie see Joe, employed as a waiter, pretend that he is a performer, stumble into a bit of clowning which costs him his job. On a visit to a studio, they watch Lyda Roberti undulate, meet Laurel & Hardy who burlesque handsomely as mustached Mexican bandits. While Nellie casually knocks out Laurel & Hardy with a champagne bottle, Rinaldo snakes Cecilia away to his apartment where he starts to seduce her with the aid of an Indian love charm. He is prancing over the divan, shouting to Cecilia to stop crying mascara over the cushions, when Joe and Nellie come dashing to her rescue. After many other antics, Cecilia finally has her debut as a singer. Sample caper: Hardy swallows an inch-long harmonica after which Laurel plays Pop Goes the Weasel by pressing on Hardy’s sensitive circumference.

Those cinemaddicts whose weakness is Laurel & Hardy, but who prefer to get these characters in short, excruciating doses, should be pleased with Pick a Star. Little Mr. Laurel and fat Mr. Hardy are presented in their own persons as stars on a comedy lot, apparently that of Mr. Roach. Says Simpleton Laurel to the di rector: “When am I supposed to look dumb?”

* ”Speak softly and carry a big stick, you will go far,” originally used by Roosevelt I to describe his methods of coping -with the Xew York Republican machine.