Cinema: The New Pictures: Jan. 7, 1935

The Ndw Pictures

Forsaking All Others (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Dill Todd (Robert Montgomery) leaves his fiancee, Mary Clay (Joan Crawford), waiting at the church while he elopes with his old mistress. The best man, Jeff Williams (Clark Gable), then spanks Mary with a hairbrush. These antics are intended to suggest that all three characters are urbane patricians, filled with charm and worldly wisdom. Lest the point remain in doubt, they speak exclusively in hard-boiled whimsey. When Jeff calls on Mary he kisses her and says: “Perfectly beautiful outside! How inside?” Mary: “Swell, inside.” This means that Mary has forgotten Dill.

When she sees Dill again, Mary finds out her mistake. She and Dill are soon up to their old tricks, insulting the proprietors of roadside restaurants, wrecking Rolls-Royce roadsters and imposing on their friends. When they spend a night together, Dill further establishes his character as a sophisticate by catching cold, getting burned and sleeping alone on a downstairs sofa. His bride divorces him and he is on the point of settling down with Mary after all, when she discovers she is wrong again. Jeff Williams is the man she loves. They go off to Spain together, leaving Dill puzzled on the pier.

That Forsaking All Others should be offered as a self-sufficient comedy of manners is a reflection less on Hollywood than on that portion of the public which it will delight. Adapted from an unsuccessful play in which Tallulah Bankhead performed (TIME, March 13, 1933), produced with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s finest trimmings, it contains a few bits of expert comedy by Charles Butterworth. Worst shot: Dill Todd giving Mary Clay a ride on the handlebars of a borrowed bicycle, landing in a pigpen.

I’ve Been Around (Universal). Rochelle Hudson is the society girl to whom Chester Morris gets engaged before she falls in love with G. P. Huntley, a nasal newcomer whose sallow face and English twang should make him successful as a cad. When Miss Hudson makes the discovery that Huntley has been after her money she marries Morris on the rebound, but makes the mistake of explaining this to him. He walks out. When he comes back, after the usual Continental revelry, Huntley has dropped in for a drink, and Morris is almost through the door again when Miss Hudson swallows something in the bathroom. Thereupon she undergoes the fastest collapse from poison ever photographed.

The Little Minister (RKO). That quality, usually defined as whimsey, which admirers of Sir James M. Barrie find so charming in his prose, is impossible to reproduce upon the screen. For this reason The Little Minister lacks some of the effect of the novel from which it was derived. It attempts, therefore, to substitute charms of its own. Because of the delicacy with which Director Richard Wallace handled the story, and the peculiar grace of Katharine Hepburn in the role that Maude Adams created in 1897, the substitution is entirely satisfactory.

The story of The Little Minister concerns the Scottish village of Thrums and the alarm which overtakes its devout residents when they learn that Mr. Dishart (John Beal), the rector at Auld Licht, has fallen in love with a gypsy. The panic in the parish is only exceeded by that of Mr. Dishart himself who, when he becomes aware of the state of his feelings, decides that the gypsy is a wanton. Actually, as the audience knows, Babbie is not a prowling vagrant at all, but the ward of Lord Rintoul, who lives in a castle at the top of the hill. Her habit of skulking through the woods in a dimity throw indicates not kleptomania but her desire to help the Thrums weavers in their dealings with the soldiers whom Lord Rintoul has imported to put a stop to difficulties at the mill.

If the adaptors of The Little Minister had modernized The Little Minister, they could have been accused of dodging all the honest implications of their theme in order to effect a sentimental happy ending. As a period piece, its unlikely personnel, its carefully sustained atmosphere and even its climax, reached when the hero’s mother shows the village elders a lock of his baby hair, are in order. Lacking the tidal-wave sentimentality which made Little Women such an astounding hit a year ago (TIME, Nov. 27, 1933), The Little Minister should nonetheless seem pleasant to the public, admirable to the Legion of Decency and a masterpiece to Katharine Hepburn’s devotees. Good shot: Wearyworld (Andy Clyde), the lonely village constable, trying to find someone to talk to as he makes his rounds.