Cinema: The New Pictures: Sep. 10, 1934

Chained (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) ends with a scene on an Argentine cattle ranch where Mike Bradley (Clark Gable), Yale 1926, is living with his divorcee bride, Diane (Joan Crawford). Diane opens a letter from the husband (Otto Kruger) she has just deserted and says to Mike: “Richard has gone to Maine for the summer.” Mike Bradley’s reply is intended to reveal him as a young man of generous and perceptive sentiments. “That’s great,” he says. “We’ll send him some fancy beef for a barbecue.”

The theory that a barbecue is adequate consolation for a shattered marriage indicates the intellectual plane of Chained. This does not prevent it from being an entertaining specimen of baloney cinema, replete with sex and high life. In it, Clark Gable wears a little mustache and Joan Crawford gives all she has to her performance as a lady. Most vulgar shot: Mike, Diane and their friend Johnnie (Stuart Erwin) unbuttoning their breeches after a large meal.

Now and Forever (Paramount) shows how Jerry (Gary Cooper), an attractive young man of questionable integrity, is reformed when a baby named Penelope (Shirley Temple) comes into his life. Penelope is his child by an earlier marriage. When first reminded of her, he is having some difficulty meeting the hotel bills incurred in an excursion through the Orient with Toni (Carole Lombard). He is confident that he can sell his unpleasant brother-in-law the right to adopt the child for enough money to perpetuate the irresponsibilities that he enjoys with Toni. It is partly Toni’s resentment of this proposed bargain and partly Penelope’s charm that make him decide, on meeting his daughter, to keep her himself. He even decides to lead a new life, and Toni believes him although she knows he has financed his intentions by selling a bogus gold mine to Sir Guy Standing. At this point, with Sir Guy turning out to be twice as bogus as the mine, Jerry is forced by circumstances of his own making to remain what he has always been—a crook.

So persuasively told, so well mounted is Now and Forever that its old tricks seem almost new. In a slightly different combination are to be found the ingredients which in Little Miss Marker made dimpled, piping Shirley Temple a national sensation. When Shirley holds a monolog with an imaginary person whom she addresses as “Mr. Cosgrove,” when she gives herself parlor airs as a rival of her “new mother” for her father’s attention, when she cheats a contemporary out of a pair of roller skates, she further validates her growing place as the sprightliest cinema prodigy since Jackie Coogan. Good shot: Gary Cooper reading What Every Young Mother Should Know.

Crime Without Passion (Paramount) concerns that most dependable of cinema miscreants, the criminal lawyer. Lee Gentry (Claude Rains) defends guilty ne’er-do-wells between love affairs. In the course of shifting his affections from a brunette dancer (Margo) to a blonde socialite (Whitney Bourne), he shoots the former and finds himself trying to escape a familiar predicament.

An artful and intelligent horror picture, Crime Without Passion includes a superb performance by Claude Rains (The Invisible Man), who can be as exciting with his face as without it, and the debuts of two interesting novices: Socialite Whitney Bourne, who played on the stage in Firebird and John Brown, and Margo, a Mexican who used to dance at Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

If Crime Without Passion chills the cinema public, it should likewise create some disturbance in the industry. It was written, directed and produced by two scenarists whose experience in Hollywood convinced them that the standard procedure in cinemanufacture is extravagant and inefficient. On a record of having written, singly or together, cinemas like Scarface, Topaze, Front Page, Viva Villa, Twentieth Century, Authors Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur last spring persuaded Paramount to give them distribution contracts for four features on its 1934 schedule. They then hired Photographer Lee Garmes, who two years ago won the Academy’s Award for his work in Shanghai Express, leased an empty studio at Astoria, L. I., set to work with an inexpensive cast. In Crime Without Passion Helen Hayes and Fanny Brice appear as extras. It took 28 days to make, cost one-third of an average Hollywood feature. Albert Johnson designed its sets (see p. 36). Next Hecht-MacArthur product, currently being made at Sloatsburg, N. Y. but not yet titled, will have a Russian background.

La Cucaracha (Pioneer). Color in cinema is one of the few subjects on which Hollywood producers have been frankly pessimistic. When it had a boom six years ago, they invested in it—and lost heavily. In 1932, Technicolor Inc. perfected a three-color process. First used by Walt Disney cartoons, it attracted the attention of John Hay (“Jock”) Whitney who, with his cousin Cornelius Vanderbilt (“Sonny”) Whitney, last year formed Pioneer Pictures. Inc., hired Scene Designer Robert Edmond Jones to help make their first picture. La Cucaracha, which may well put color back on the cinema map, will be followed by a list of nine Pioneer pictures, the first of which is Becky Sharp. Produced as carefully as a full-length feature, expertly photographed and directed, La Cucaracha shows Steffi Duna and Don Alvarado as inmates of a Mexican village inn, dancing, singing and squabbling, and so attracting the attention of a visiting impresario (Paul Porcasi). Their song, La Cucaracha (“The Cockroach”), is the Mexican folk ballad which cinemaddicts heard in Viva Villa. Brightest shot: black-haired Porcasi, dressed in a white waistcoat and blue tie, shaking crimson drops of tabasco sauce on a sea-green salad.