Cinema: The New Pictures: Aug. 27, 1934

The Cat’s Paw (Harold Lloyd) is the first picture manufactured by its star since 1932. Unlike its predecessors, it contains no nerve-wracking escapes from railroad trains, no breathless danglings from skyscraper ledges. It is “straight” comedy about the son of a Chinese missionary and the difficulties he encounters when he returns to his hometown to find himself a wife.

The first person whom Ezekiel Cobb (Lloyd) meets in Stockport is the town’s political boss (George Barbier), searching for a dummy candidate to run for mayor on a reform ticket. It seems to Boss Mayo and his cronies that Ezekiel Cobb is naïve enough for their purposes. When they nominate him, he wanders into a night club with a cigaret-counter girl (Una Merkel), attracts constituents, first by frolicking with chorus girls, then by defending a newsboy who has been mistreated by his rival candidate (Alan Dinehart).

As mayor, Ezekiel Cobb comports himself like a combination of Fiorello La Guardia and Charlie Chan. He says: “Honesty without experience is as water with no bucket to carry it in—Ling Po.” He sets out to gain experience by discharging every dishonest employe in the city government, awarding a garbage disposal contract to the lowest bidder instead of to the grafter who expects it. When outraged politicians slip a package of incriminating bonds into his safe deposit vaults, Ezekiel Cobb decides to use brusque methods. He rounds up every malefactor in Stockport, locks them in a cellar, threatens to have them all beheaded with a sword, which he sharpens before their eyes. After they have confessed their misdeeds, mild-mannered Ezekiel lets them go. He decides the cigaret girl will make a satisfactory wife and that he does not need to go back to China. Says he: “Why should the meadow lark carry food to the sea-gull’s children when her own young are famished?—Ezekiel Cobb.”

The delay that followed Harold Lloyd’s last picture Movie Crazy (TIME, Sept. 26, 1932) was partly due to the fact that he could find no suitable story. He bought The Cat’s Paw when Author Clarence Budington Kelland had finished only the first chapter, offered suggestions to make the part more to his taste. When the story was finished Producer Lloyd was amazed to find that none of the antics which his private staff of “gagmen” usually arrange for him seemed to fit the plot. He finally accepted the advice of his director, Sam Taylor, to make the picture without his customary comedy inventions. Less dependent on its star than previous Lloyd products but almost equally hilarious. The Cat’s Paw should win the plaudits of the Legion of Decency without boring its opponents. Typical shot: Ezekiel Cobb, when he tries to use a telephone for the first time, talking in it without removing the receiver.

Dames (Warner). In Wonder Bar, Dance Director Berkeley experimented with the technique of mirrors, to triple his chorus. In Dames he carries this inspiration to its logical conclusion by having an entire chorus number performed, in one, by Ruby Keeler. This interlude, stupidest in the picture, illustrates a song called “I Only Have Eyes for You.” It starts on a subway where Ruby Keeler’s face replaces the images on the soap advertisements, reaches a climax in which three decks of Ruby Keelers dance up and down a triple staircase. More diverting Berkeley experiments show a collection of chorus girls first disguised as alarm clocks, getting out of bed. immersing themselves in soapsuds, paddling off to a rehearsal; a chorus in black tights dancing on a white ferris wheel mounted on a turntable; a laundry number in which Joan Blondell sings “The Girl at the Ironing Board,” executes a minuet with bits of underwear on a clothesline.

The story of Dames concerns a young songwriter and the heiress who alarms her family by performing in his first show. No less standard is the cast: Guy Kibbee, Dick Powell, Joan Blondell, Ruby Keeler, Hugh Herbert, Zasu Pitts. Among its songs are: “When You Were a Smile on Your Mother’s Lips,” “Try To See It My Way,” “Dames.” Funny shot: A wealthy reformer (Hugh Herbert) drinking a bottle of elixir to cure his hiccups.

Treasure Island (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Lionel Barrymore sets the tone of this picture at the very start. As Buccaneer Billy Bones, a Rasputin without beard or belch, he terrifies goodfolk with his tall tales of pirates who courted the favor of gentlewomen only to slit their white arms and mix blue blood with good rum.

A faithful, exciting re-creation of Stevenson’s blood-and-thunder melodrama, the film brings Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper together again for the first time since The Bowery. As Jim Hawkins, a role heretofore played on stage and screen by girls, Jackie Cooper scampers nimbly up & down the Hispaniola’s rigging, speaks his lines with wistful charm. Beery straps one fat leg up behind him, puts on a cloak and as “Long John” Silver hobbles through scenes of mutiny, mayhem and murder with salty gusto. Good shot: Beery teaching Jackie Cooper to spit to “lourd” (leeward) because “it sails like a gull.”