The New Pictures

Speak Easily (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) has nothing to do with liquor. Its hero is an addle-headed professor (Buster Keaton) whose valet leads him to believe that he has inherited a fortune. Keaton sets out for Chicago to squander his money but on the way he meets a theatrical troupe and falls in love with a dancer (Ruth Selwyn). When someone says something about going to a speakeasy, Keaton is unable to restrain a pedagogical impulse. "You mean, speak easily," he says.

Most of the comedy in Speak Easily is superior to this trifle. Jimmy Durante is much funnier than Keaton in a much smaller part. A comedy of the lunatic genre, its climaxes arrive when Keaton is pursued by a blonde comedienne (Thelma Todd). After he has become angel for the theatrical troupe, Keaton gets unintentionally tangled up with his chorus at the Manhattan premiere and is greeted by the audience as a magnificent comedian.

Crooner (First National) is not likely to please admirers of Rudy Vallee, Bing Crosby, Russ Columbo et al. It shows a radio singer (David Manners) who is a lout, a boor and a buffoon. Inflated by his sudden popularity--which is less the effect of his abilities than of his pressagent's--he is faithless to his fiancee (Ann Dvorak) and haughty to the patrons of his night club. When they heckle him, he hits one, a cripple, on the chin. Presently Crooner Teddy Taylor (unlike Crooners Vallee, Crosby, Columbo et al.) is a crooner no longer. He is tooting a saxophone in a third-rate orchestra. Deprived of his public, he at least has sense enough to retain his fiancee. . . .

Crooners and Broadway colyumists appeared upon the U. S. scene at about the same time and there has always been a deadly rivalry between them. It is easy to perceive the satisfaction of Author Rian James, Broadway colyumist for the Brooklyn Eagle, at being able to express his annoyance in a medium as rich as cinema. He has the pressagent (Ken Murray) describe Crooner Hayes as "Marconi's gift to the morons" and shows Taylor unable to carry a tune.

Love Me Tonight (Paramount). A few more pictures like this will make theatrical producers begin to wonder why their public no longer likes the conventional artifice of stage musical comedies. Plot and music can chime together in the cinema. Instead of having a chorus plug the first song in Love Me Tonight, it was easy enough for Director Rouben Mamoulian to show Maurice Chevalier inventing it: a man walking out of Chevalier's tailor shop singing it; someone catching the air on the sidewalk and whistling it in a train; soldiers marching to it through a countryside where gypsies hear them; the gypsies playing the same song until even a Princess, mooning about on the balcony outside her bedroom, begins to sing it. The Princess (Jeanette MacDonald) is, naturally, a relative of the Vicomte de Vareze who has just diddled Chevalier out of 20 suits of clothes. When Chevalier arrives at the chateau to collect his money, the Vicomte finds it expedient to conceal his extravagance from his father (C. Aubrey Smith) by introducing Chevalier as the Baron Coutelin. The customary developments of a story based on involuntary imposture-- Chevalier making love to the Princess, avoiding the attentions of the Princess' little cousin (Myrna Loy), making friends with the stag in a stag-hunt, singing a song about an Apache--lead up to a climactic scene of parody which is all the more charming because it pretends not to be parody at all. To assure Chevalier that his being a tailor makes no difference in her feelings for him, Jeanette MacDonald overtakes a railroad train on horseback, stops the engine by standing in the tracks.

Love Me Tonight, even more than earlier Chevalier pictures which Ernst Lubitsch directed, has that air of light poetry as well as farce which the French comedies of Rene Clair contributed to cinema technique. In a plot which seems scarcely more than an impromptu play on words and music the only illogicality is Chevalier's preferring Jeanette MacDonald to Myrna Loy.

Myrna Loy can scarcely have been surprised at this state of affairs. She has been passed over for leading ladies who are usually her inferior in charm, appearance and ability, in more pictures than any other young actress in Hollywood. Born in Helena, Mont., she went to Los Angeles to go to art school. There she fashioned some bits of sculpture that met with the approval of the late Rudolph Valentino and his wife. She became their protege. When Mrs. Valentino produced What Price Beauty?, Myrna Loy had a small part. She has had more than a hundred small parts since then.

Devil and the Deep (Paramount ). In the effort to give him enough to do in his first U. S. cinema appearance, Paramount made the mistake of making plump, British Charles Laughton's part in this picture a little too "fat." The result is that, in the person of Commander Charles Sturm, Laughton becomes the central figure in the story and what was supposed to be the main plot line--a romance between Mrs. Sturm (Tallulah Bankhead) and a handsome lieutenant (Gary Cooper)-- seems a minor bit of business that might almost have been left out. Cooper and Bankhead have an exciting escape from a sunken submarine and are later tending toward matrimony but by this time the picture is really over. It ends when Sturm has steered his submarine under the bow of a steamer because he is morbidly jealous of his wife.

Jealousy is an emotion rarely treated as it should be in the cinema. Laughton's exposition of the matter has a florid brilliance that puts Tallulah Bankhead in the unpleasant position of being outplayed in her first good picture. Far more hair-raising than the escape from the submarine is the way Sturm watches his wife out of the corner of his eye while laughing at one of his own jokes; the way he smiles while letting his wife know that he knows about her affair with the lieutenant.

The First Year (Fox). Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell always marry each other in the cinema but this time they do it in the first reel instead of the last. The rest of the picture is taken up with their rather sweet little domestic difficulties which end when Tommy (Charles Farrell) puts over a real estate deal and Gracie (Janet Gaynor) whispers a golden secret in his ear. Farrell-Gaynor romances must remain an acquired taste, but Director William Howard managed to make this one preserve the warmth of Frank Craven's play from which it was adapted. Good sequence: Gracie trying to prepare a dinner for Tommy and an important client with the aid of a colored girl (Leila Bennett) who admits that she waits on table less expertly than she "washes."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.