Cinema: The New Pictures: Dec. 10, 1934

Music in the Air (Fox) A small-town girl (June Lang) is tried out for the starring role in a musicomedy and for once, does not succeed. Nor does she jilt her bumpkin boy friend (Douglass Montgomery), although for a moment or two it seems likely that he will succumb to the wiles of Gloria Swanson. Instead of Broadway, the scene is Bavaria and instead of jazz the music is a sort of operetta through which continuously looms the grave, of fended shade of Victor Herbert. Music in the Air is principally important for providing Miss Swanson, 36, with her current comeback vehicle. She seems very well preserved and sings through her teeth in a sprightly way. Aside from her triangular mouth and a song called “I’ve Told Every Little Star,” the mainstay of the action is June Lang, a blonde who has spent several years on the Fox lot, having her teeth straightened and taking lessons in singing, acting, and diction. Miss Lang has emerged as completely unremarkable a young woman as the cinema has produced in many a year.

Broadway Bill (Columbia) concerns a sporting gentleman who, impatient with conventional life in a small town, goes back to the racetracks whence he came, enters his horse, Broadway Bill, in the Derby and sees him win against heavy odds. In outline this is the story the cinema has been telling for a decade. On the screen it is something else again. Gaily adapted by Robert Riskin, ably directed by Frank Capra (It Happened One Night, Lady for a Day), it becomes one of the most wisely amusing and genuinely original comedies of the year, an up-to-date sporting print with bright colors and clear lines. Difficult to analyze and impossible to imitate, the hallmark of Director Capra’s style is his way of turning what for an other director would be a commonplace “gag”‘ into a vital and important incident. In Broadway Bill, he makes a shot of the Higgins family lifting their soup spoons with terrifying regularity show exactly why Dan Brooks abhors their company. He makes a brilliant thumbnail caricature of Dan’s amazing friend. Colonel Pettigrew, out of a sequence in which the two meet for lunch after a long separation, each hoping to borrow money from the other and neither having enough cash to pay the check. This ability and Frank Capra’s knack for getting the best out of his actors are what should make Broadway Bill as widely popular and as much admired by critics as that director’s other two astounding hits. As Dan Brooks, Warner Baxter gives by far his best performance; Myrna Loy is even more expert than usual as Dan’s sympathetic sister-in-law who helps him groom Broadway Bill for the Derby, pawns her clothes to pay the entry fee. Good shot: Broadway Bill’s rooster mascot crowing in his stall.

Flirtation Walk (Warner). That patriotic fervor is an emotion only a shade less potent at the box office than mother love and Christian piety is a premise which the cinema has demonstrated periodically from The Birth of a Nation to The President Vanishes. Warner Brothers were quick to perceive that flag-waving is as well suited to light musicomedy as to serious drama. Flirtation Walk, made with “the full co-operation of the U. S. Army.” is an animated advertisement for West Point, Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, and military discipline in general. In it, Dick Powell is the impudent private who, assigned to act as chauffeur for the general’s daughter when she visits Hawaii, gets into trouble when he takes her for a moonlight joyride. Ruby Keeler is the general’s daughter who, when her father has been assigned to the Point as Superintendent, watches Powell, wearing a shako and a beatific grin, graduate four years later. Between times, Flirtation Walk investigates such West Point traditions as plebe hazing, commencement exercises and the Kissing Rock under which Miss Keeler fails to entice Powell. A One Hundredth Night Show gives the stars a chance to sing songs called “Flirtation Walk,” “No Horse, No Wife, No Mustache,” “Mister and Missus Is the Name.”

In Flirtation Walk, the co-operation of the U. S. Army does not go so far as converting the parade ground at West Point into a revolving stage, nor does the Busby Berkeley influence appear in the cadets’ maneuvers. Shots of the corps drilling, actually photographed at West Point, are the most impressive parts of Flirtation Walk.

Babes in Toyland (Hal Roach). With the notable exception of Walt Disney cartoons, fantasy is not a form of entertainment in which the cinema excels. Particularly in fantasy for children, there usually prevails a certain horrid condescension on the part of producers who, unwilling to risk inventing fantasies of their own, prefer to adapt classics. This fact makes it hard to believe that any adaptation of Victor Herbert’s famed operetta would amount to more than a ridiculous calamity. Fortunately, Producer Hal Roach, well-versed in the art of gag comedies, saw fit to throw most of his original material out the studio window, retaining only three Herbert songs. What remains is a queer blend of Alice in Wonderland, Mother Goose, Laurel & Hardy, and Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. That the result makes no sense whatever in no way diminishes the fun of Babes in Toyland. Ollie Dee (Hardy) and Stannie Dum (Laurel) are boarders at the establishment of the Old Lady Who Lives in a Shoe. Her daughter, Bo-Peep (Charlotte Henry), is being pursued by old Silas Barnaby who holds a mortgage on the Shoe. But she loves Tom-Tom the Piper’s son, who periodically helps her find her lost sheep. To thwart the blundering efforts of Ollie and Stannie to prevent the apparently inevitable manage de convenance, Silas Barnaby kidnaps one of the Three Little Pigs and plants a string of sausages in Tom-Tom’s house to make it appear that Tom-Tom is guilty of the crime. Tom-Tom is sentenced to exile in Bogey-land but before its inhabitants—miniature King-Kongs with pitchfork teeth—have time to destroy him, the villagers of Toyland discover the real culprit. This leads first to a heroic rescue of Tom-Tom by Ollie and Stannie and finally to a war in which the bogeys are decimated by a regiment of wooden soldiers.

Minors, for whom Babes in Toyland was presumably intended, are almost sure to like it. A more important recommendation is the strong probability that it will not bore, disgust or irritate their elders.

Anne of Green Gables (RKO) is a dramatization of the Lucy Maud Montgomery novel, published a quarter of a century ago, whose heroine Mark Twain called “the dearest and most moving and delightful child of fiction since the immortal Alice.” An orphan from the orphanage, Anne Shirley finds herself unwanted when she turns up at the farm of Matthew (0. P. Heggie) and Marilla (Helen Westley), who had expected to adopt a boy. Her ready smile and winning impudence soon earn her the affection of her foster-parents and all goes well until she falls in love with Gilbert (Tom Brown) whose mother, as a girl, had jilted Matthew. It is a characteristic of the lavender-&-old-lace-school in the cinema that such slight pretexts cause tremendous difficulties. It takes a normal-school career for Anne, a deathbed scene for Matthew, to reunite the lovers.

Although it lacks the high-powered sentiment that made Little Women one of the box-office hits of 1933, Anne of Green Gables would probably have been able to impress itself on the public without the aid of banal publicity tricks like the one whereby Dawn O’Day, the obscure actress who plays the lead, got a Los Angeles court to change her name to that of the heroine in the picture because “Anne Shirley has always been my favorite fiction character.”