The New Pictures: Jul. 15, 1935

Orchids to You (Fox) concerns a beauteous blonde who is in love with a handsome brunet who is in love with his wife who is in love with another man. The blonde (Jean Muir) is a successful Manhattan florist. The brunet (John Boles) is a successful Manhattan attorney. The wife (Ruthelma Stevens) is a throaty creature who spends most of her spare moments in her lover’s arms while pretending she is attending a dying mother.

Set mostly against a fancy background of flowers. Orchids to You is more engaging than it sounds, not only because the dialog is swift or because cactus-faced Charles Butterworth bounds in & out to utter countless inanities, but because Jean Muir knows better than most of her contemporaries how to indicate unrequited love without resorting to breast-expansion or weeping on an embroidered chaise longue. The picture’s smart decor changes abruptly and briefly when, to prove that hard-working Lawyer Boles knows how to relax, an Easter scene at an orphan asylum is injected, wherein Boles, dressed in a magician’s garb complete with plug hat, wig, barbershop mustache and false nose (see cut), does tricks for the inmates. Silliest sequence: Miss Muir being sent to jail for contempt when, quizzed by Boles in a divorce action for which he is the plaintiff’s attorney, she refuses to divulge to whom Boles’s wife’s lover was sending daily orchids.

Ginger (Fox). Following the success of creamy little Shirley Temple, it was inevitable that before long another child actress would pop up in Hollywood. Yet 9-year-old Jane Withers, Fox’s latest bid for prepuberty adulation, is all that Hollywood might suppose a popular child actress should not be. Her round irregular face is almost entirely surrounded by a mop of straight black hair. Her snub nose screws up like a Boston bull pup’s. Her plumpish figure looks far better in East Side gingham than in dainty drawing-room voile. When so directed, she can be as unladylike in speech as a baseball umpire. These qualities indicate a career that should remain top-notch long after Shirley Temple has lost her teeth and retired to live on her income.

Ginger, Jane Withers’ first starring picture, is uncomplicated enough to conform to the limited rules laid down for child heroines denied the privilege of passion. It details the education of an urchin. Phase No. 1 displays her as a tenement scamp named Ginger, haphazardly raised by a bibbing old foster uncle (0. P. Heg-gie). In the role of brat, she stones windows, pastes neighborhood friends with fruit, eludes policemen by sliding gaily down a coal chute, fabricates glibly and frequently.

Phase No. 2 commences when, haled into court for petty larceny, she is taken under the wing of a fatuous matron named Mrs. Parker (Katharine Alexander) who thinks Ginger good copy for a proposed book on child-raising. But Ginger, once installed in the matron’s smart house, is bad copy indeed. She takes an instant dislike to her beauteous, black-haired benefactress whom she insults with or without provocation. She knocks over vases, upsets dinner with her bad manners, complains that “this dump is an ice box,” thinks all the servants are waiters. By the time she has persuaded the Parker son (Jackie Searl) that sliding down banisters and becoming embroiled in gutter fisticuffs is more fun than harp-twanging, she is the favorite household pet of everyone except Mrs. Parker. That she finally succeeds in winning over the entire cast is evidenced when at the end the whole family partakes of Mulligan stew—Ginger’s favorite dish—in a garret room. “This,” cries the elegant Mrs. Parker, “is the nuts.”

Escapade (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is the result of superimposing upon the pattern of Viennese waltz-time romance the kind of highly contemporary comedy of which William Powell is currently Hollywood’s ablest exponent. That the result is mildly entertaining is thanks partly to Powell, partly to Director Robert Z. Leonard, but mostly to a totally unknown cinemactress named Luise Rainer. Miss Rainer is Leopoldine Major, private companion to an aging Viennese duchess. She is peremptorily whisked out of the obscurity of her position when a dashing young artist (Powell), compelled for reasons of gallantry to conceal the name of a lady whom he has sketched in the nude, selects another name at random which happens to be hers. From that point on, experienced cinemaddicts are not likely to derive much suspense from watching the artist’s serious romance with Miss Major endangered temporarily by the jealousy of a mistress (Mady Christians) he is trying to discard and the rage of an elderly doctor (Frank Morgan) who discovers that his young wife (Virginia Bruce) was really the subject of the nude portrait. As a substitute, they may derive amusement from scenes like the one in which “Poldi” Major breaks in on the duchess’ petulant gardener to tell him about her conquest; or the one in which Frank Morgan furtively attempts domestic reconciliation.

The most deplorable thing about Luise Rainer (pronounced Rhiner) is the effect which she is likely to have upon U. S. women between the ages of 18 and 25 to whom the majority of Hollywood productions are specifically addressed and who will inevitably try to imitate her mannerisms.

Born in Düsseldorf, educated in Switzerland and trained for five years by Max Reinhardt, she went to Hollywood on contract last year and had apparently been completely overlooked when Myrna Loy, after the picture had been in production two days, walked out of Escapade. Luise Rainer was popped into the part so hurriedly that M-G-M did not even have time to think up an intelligent publicity campaign. First described thoughtlessly as a rival to MGM’s Greta Garbo, whom she resembles less than anyone else on the screen, Luise Rainer was next advertised as the private discovery of William Powell, because he was generous enough, when the picture was completed, to recommend her for co-star billing. A student of archeology, sculpture and the ballet, Miss Rainer lives in Santa Monica.

Paris in Spring (Paramount). The current operetta cycle has developed a formula of its own, to which the nudity and wisecracks, the crooned syncopation and eager pace of last year’s musicals would be an unthinkable violation. Paris in Spring handsomely exhibits all the proper appointments in the manner of the day: no gags, no chorus, no comic. Sprightliness is the keynote of the dialog. Songwriters Harry Revel and Mack Gordon, with a fetching title song and probably the year’s best tango (Bonjour, Mam’selle), are continental in chunks, and Mary Ellis, though she frequently sings with abandon, keeps her well-proportioned body covered at all times with expensive furs or drygoods.

Tullio Carminati is an Italian nobleman who meets Ida Lupino on top of the Eiffel Tower from which he is doing his best to jump because Miss Ellis, a cafe singer, has refused to marry him. James Blakeley, looking for Ida Lupino, his fiancee, enlists the help of Lynne Overman, magnificent as a member of the Sûreté. Things build to a spacious and impressively scored wedding night in a chateau with a large cast of serfs singing nuptial choruses regardless of the fact that neither woman is with the right man, and neither is married.

Notable are the production sequences in the Paris cafe, with Miss Ellis made up successively as a schoolmistress, a cocotte and a chestnut seller, singing Paris in Spring. There is also a turntable upheld by living statuary on which she sings something about jealousy. Cinemagoers with sharp eyes and good memories may look twice at the cafe’s taxi-starter: Jack Mulhall, star of silent days.