Monday, Dec. 28, 1931
The New Pictures
Private Lives (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). "Certain women should be struck regularly--like gongs." In itself, this is not particularly witty. It is neither an epigram nor a wisecrack and anyone who made it at a dinner table would be lucky if it caused a smile. On the other hand, it is light-hearted and emphatic. Spoken by a cultivated young man to a lady with whom he is both in love and angry, it becomes funny. It illustrates the formula for Noel Coward's Private Lives, in which the author made his job easy by arranging his situations so skillfully that almost any gay line, spoken clearly and with enthusiasm, would start a laugh.
In this production, directed by Sidney Franklin, Norma Shearer and Robert Montgomery play through the almost actor-proof situations of the comedy with savoir-faire which equals if it does not excel that of their predecessors, Author Noel Coward & Gertrude Lawrence.* It is a play about two tender-hearted but irascible worldlings who, having divorced each other and remarried, meet again on their second honeymoons. Re-captivated by each other, they scamper away from their new spouses, enjoy a truant honeymoon in an Alpine chalet. By the time the deserted and negligible husband and wife arrive at the chalet, the place has been turned into a shambles. The truants have spent the second act in airy lovemaking, flip bickering, pillow-fights, blows. Next morning all four have breakfast together. High words are spoken. Norma Shearer and Robert Montgomery exchange glances, sneak out the door together with their luggage.
Private Lives will please educated audiences, tantalize others. Good shot: Miss Shearer smashing a phonograph record over Mr. Montgomery.
Tonight or Never (United Artists-Samuel Goldwyn). Critics who feel that the cinema should be an independent medium are discouraged because an overwhelming majority of the best talkies are reproductions of successful plays or novels. Tonight or Never is a case in point. The cast--with the exception of Alison Skipworth, Gloria Swanson and Boris Karloff, Frankenstein's monster, who herein plays a waiter--is the one which made the play a success in Manhattan when it was produced by the late David Belasco. The cinema, directed by Mervyn Leroy, differs from Mr. Belasco's production mainly in the fact that Gloria Swanson performs more quietly than Helen Gahagan; her restraint makes the dialog seem more knowing than it is.
The story is a frivolous incident in the career of a Budapest diva. Informed that her singing lacks warmth and emotion, she is glad when she falls in love with a young man who has been observed loitering hopefully near her front door. She visits him at his apartment and succeeds in her frank efforts to have an affair with him. The comedy in this part of the action resides largely in the fact that the opera singer thinks the young man is a gigolo while the audience is sure that he is not. In what corresponds to the last act of the play--when the opera singer has given an inspired rendition of Tosca, dismissed a boring fiance--she discovers that her gigolo is an American impresario, traveling incognito with his good-humored aunt (Alison Skipworth).
Melvyn Douglas handles his role well and photographs so pleasantly that he is likely to remain in Hollywood for some time. So is Ferdinand Gottschalk, a first-rate character actor, who skips about Gloria Swanson chanting in a strange way when pleased by any turn of events. Tonight or Never is an easygoing, insignificant and funny cinematic escapade.
Sooky (Paramount) is a sequel to Skippy, directed by Norman Taurog, with Jackie Cooper and Robert Coogan impersonating the principal characters in Percy Crosby's famed comic strip. Small Coogan's most notable characteristic is a treble voice so high that at times it amounts to" a whistle. Cooper has a thoughtful little face, often pinched by childish melancholy; in addition, he is a superb actor. This picture has the defect of most sequels, in that episodes similar to the ones which seemed spontaneous in Skippy, now appear to be part of a formula. They are still affecting, touched by gently sentimental sympathy for small children and their sly vagaries.
The underplot in Sooky concerns Sooky's efforts to get into a juvenile club whose members wear uniforms and drill like soldiers. To do this, he learns how to play a bugle, marches with Skippy in a parade arranged to discomfort Skippy's father who is running for mayor. Presently, Sooky's mother dies; Sooky goes to live at Skippy's house. Given a soldier's uniform, he wears it to bed.
Skippy and Huckleberry Finn were far less profitable exhibitions than their producers intended them to be. Whether what are known, in the trade, as "kid pictures'' will continue to be made will therefore depend to some extent on the box office reception accorded Sooky which is handicapped by having no concern with sex or fear. Good shot: Skippy and Sooky securing a load of fuel for Sooky's mother by molesting the fireman on a train so that he throws lumps of coal at them.
Safe in Hell (First National) is routine death-before-dishonor melodrama except that in most such cases it is considered against the rules for either death or dishonor, no matter how imminent they may be, actually to occur. This time a streetwalker has escaped from New Orleans to an unnamed island to avoid the legal penalty for a murder which she thinks she has committed. She (Dorothy Mackaill), finds herself in a quandary. She can either accept the attentions of a greasy jail-warden, or allow him to give evidence that will cause her to be killed before her husband returns to the island to save her.
Here the authors put in what the producers perhaps thought was a touch original enough to warrant a $300,000 investment. The husband is unable to solve the situation. He goes back to his ship, leaving Dorothy Mackaill to select her own alternative. Safe in Hell is crude, trite, sporadically exciting.
*A talking picture of the stage performance of Private Lives, specially made for the purpose last winter, enabled Actors Shearer and Montgomery to approximate the gestures, tones and actions of Actors Coward and Lawrence.
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