Cinema: The New Pictures: Aug. 26, 1935

Alice Adams (RKO). The tests of time and translation into cinema have had an unpredictable effect upon the Booth Tarkington novel which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922. Then it was a sad little story about a small-town girl so ashamed because her parents were poorer than those of her friends that, when a glamorous visitor fell in love with her, she destroyed her one real chance of happiness by carrying on an absurd pretense of being richer and more popular than she was. Nowadays,, because people whose circumstances are as comfortable as those of the Adams family seem less to be pitied than admired, a daughter as ashamed of her station as Alice inevitably produces the impression of being a psychopath. The oddity of the effect which time has produced upon the story, however, lies in the inescapable fact that, far from blurring its outlines, the change has merely etched them more sharply against the background of the U. S. scene. Thus, what was in 1922 a shrewd and observant novel, emerges in 1935 as a bitingly satiric portrait of an era. Alice Adams—once a typical U. S. adolescent with scarcely more serious claims on a reader’s sympathy than Penrod or Willie Baxter—is now something infinitely more important and the heroine of a picture which, while it is often uproariously funny, is in effect a bitter and perceptive minor tragedy.

Of Hollywood’s leading stars, Katharine Hepburn is possibly the least versatile. It is precisely this limitation which made her the ideal choice for the role of Alice. The woebegone grimaces, the expressions, half childish and half addle-headed, which she uses to convey youth’s nameless longings and which are often so startlingly misplaced in her portrayals of women of the world, are those which make her portrayal of a girl whom she really understands her masterpiece to date. The supremely difficult feat of characterizing a poseuse so as to mock the poses without mocking the person behind them she carries off with success. This is best gauged by the way audiences wriggle while watching an episode like the one in which, caught by her admirer running up the steps of a business school where she contemplates taking a course, Alice archly explains that she was going in to hire a secretary for her father. As successful, in a much broader part, is oldtime Actor Fred Stone, making his first important cinema appearance as Alice’s likeable, devoted father, puzzled and uneasy as he tries to conceal from himself the assurance which her unhappiness gives him that he has made a failure of his life. Minor performances by Fred MacMurray as Alice’s young man, Ann Shoemaker as her mother, and Frank Albertson as her brother are as good as they could be. The direction of George Stevens, who at 30 is the youngest important director in Hollywood, is almost flawless.

Of the string of excruciating crises into which Alice Adams’ misconception of social values plunges her and through which the picture tells her story, the most painful is the formal dinner with which the Adams family sets out on a very hot night to impress Alice’s young man. From its first moment, when Mr. Adams is the loser in his struggle with a caviar sandwich (served without drinks), to its last, when Alice’s brother, whose place has remained ominously empty, bursts in to say that he is likely to be arrested as a thief, the dinner is an appalling display of frustrated snobbery. It ends in a moment of tragedy, when Alice takes her young man out on the porch and, speaking to him honestly for the first time, says: “Now it’s all over —in five minutes you will leave this porch and you are never coming back.”

The Call of the Wild (Twentieth Century), second cinema version of Jack London’s famed novel about the Alaska gold rush, is at its best when concerned specifically with the adventures of a St. Bernard dog which is nominally its hero. The dog Buck makes his first appearance inside a crate, snarling and growling so viciously that an eccentric young prospector named Jack Thornton (Clark Gable) is induced to add him to his sledge team. The villain of The Call of the Wild, an even more eccentric prospector named Smith (Reginald Owen), stomps onto the scene almost immediately and. when Buck tries to bite him, offers $500 for the animal so that he can have the satisfaction of shooting him. The offer is refused but Buck, having become lead dog of the team which gets Thornton, his partner Shorty (Jack Oakie) and a girl (“Loretta Young) whom they pick up in a snowdrift safely through the wilderness to Dawson, receives a chance to retaliate. Reappearing on the scene. Smith offers to bet Thornton, who is broke, $1,000 that Buck cannot pull a load of 1,000 lb. Buck pulls the load 100 yards, followed by a cheering crowd, snarls once more at Smith, lies down to lick his master’s hand.

The portions of the picture which show against fine backgrounds the mishaps of the humans involved are considerably less impressive. They reach a climax of a sort when, after Thornton and the girl he has rescued have wintered together in a log cabin, her husband, long since given up for dead, staggers in to reclaim her. Good shot: Smith reclining in a portable canvas bathtub while a guide scrubs his knees.

There are three kinds of dogs employed in the cinema industry: 1) star dogs, which average $35 a day and are trained to act any part by off-scene hand signals; 2) feature-player dogs, trained for specialties but not bright enough to respond to hand cues; 3) atmosphere dogs which work as extras and get the same pay as humans, $7.50 per day. The dog who acts the part of Buck is a Swiss St. Bernard named King, whose owner. Carl Spitz, lives on the proceeds of his kennel of 90 actors and is the No. 1 dog trainer in Hollywood.

When Call of the Wild went into production, King was an extra, notable only for his large body and sloppy, ferocious face. He was picked for the role by Director William Wellman and Producer Darryl Zanuck, who was once scriptwriter to Rin-Tin-Tin. Owner Spitz, who already had a well-trained St. Bernard star named Cappy, protested that King was not the type. Producer Zanuck gave him five weeks in which to change this situation. When the picture started. King immediately proved to be the Barrymore of St. Bernards. He is now the greatest dog star since Rin-Tin-Tin and the first important one since talkies rendered jobless the old dog actors that were accustomed to obeying shouted orders and could not be re-trained to respond to direction in pantomime. Owner Spitz expects to receive Rin-Tin-Tin’s old salary, $1,000 a week, for King, values him at $25,000.

While The Call of the Wild was in production. King got along well with the huskies who worked as extras, had a serious fight with a Great Dane named Grey Boy which, once Owner Spitz’s meal ticket. had only a bit part in the picture. Both King and Grey Boy had doubles. King’s was onetime St. Bernard star Cappy. Surly, morose, sly, undersized and drooling, King received one rude shock during the making of Call of the Wild. This was when, during a week on location on Mt. Baker, Wash., the human actors were snowed in and the dogs had to help pull a real sled of provisions up the mountain to their cabin. In addition to being the greatest dog star now in pictures—his only rivals are the police dog Flash, the Hal Roach comedian bull Petey—King, at a year and a half, is also the youngest. He is fed a quart of milk for breakfast, four pounds of raw meat with biscuits for dinner, gets two hours of lessons each morning followed by a nap on a couch with the blinds drawn, exercises by running after his owner who goes riding in the afternoon, spends his nights with Carl Spitz, whose wife sleeps with the two Spitz children, dislikes the California climate.

Bright Lights (Warner). From the vast gash which a bountiful providence has given Joe E. Brown for a mouth comes song—a ballad carefully modeled on The Man on the Flying Trapeze and entitled She Was Only an Acrobat’s Daughter. That is the outstanding innovation in this routine little comedy designed to exhibit the varied talents of Comedian Brown. Ever since Dec. 4. 1931 when a Mrs. Mary D. Armstead, 53, died laughing at him in a Los Angeles theatre, Joseph Evan Brown has had a mounting reputation as a Hollywood funnyman. Many of his films have been built around such sections of his pre-cinema career as the time when he was a professional acrobat, a baseball player. This one reverts to the period in which Brown was a burlesque comic.

For plot Bright Lights revives the old standby about the burlesque comedian who makes a hit in a Broadway show and falls in love with a fickle society heiress while his faithful wife and partner goes back to “burleycue.” Before Comedian Brown is brought to see the error of his ways he is given opportunity not only to sing and dance but turn a back somersault, take innumerable falls, chase madly hither & yon, utter his famed maniacal yell on numerous occasions and tell in baby talk an interminable story about a ” ‘little bitsy mousie.” To show his dramatic ability, he also folds his great mouth into an expression of infinite sorrow.

Low comedy is derived from two scenes in one of which Comedian Joe Brown, as Comedian Joe Wilson, is locked out of his dressing room by mistake on his opening night and is compelled to pay $20 to a ticket scalper to get into the theatre in time for his entrance cue. The other occurs when he discovers his true feelings for his wife just after he has written her a letter telling of his love for the fickle heiress and is forced to chase half way across the country in an effort to intercept it. To tall Arthur Treacher, playing the part of a saturnine and formidable English valet, falls Bright Lights’ one bright line. “I posted the letter in the box on the corner,” says he, “the one of a sickly green color.”