Selznick Out

Of all Hollywood's troubled producing companies, the most thoroughly bothered by inability to produce good pictures has been Radio-Keith-Orpheum Corp. A year ago, RKO hoped it had solved its problems by merging its two producing organizations (RKO-Pathe and RKO-Radio), hiring young David Selznick as vice president in charge of production. Last week it became certain that RKO's problems were not solved. After two months of dickering about terms and methods with RKO's eastern officials, David Selznick resigned. He agreed to postpone negotiations for a job elsewhere until he had finished RKO's current productions, conferred once more with RKO's President Benjamin B. Kahane, who rushed west. Principal cause of the resignation was a difference of opinion about using Selznick's "unit plan." This plan is to make individual producers responsible for a small number of pictures each year instead of having one producer, like Selznick, responsible for a whole year's output of 50 or more. RKO officials favored putting the unit plan into operation for all RKO pictures immediately. Producer Selznick thought that such a drastic change might jeopardize the success of his plan. He proposed that next year RKO reduce its studio product from 50 pictures to 25, supplement the 25 with a group of pictures made by four units, headed by Lewis Milestone, King Vidor, Walter Wanger, Merian C. Cooper, each to make from one to four pictures a year. Although he spent too much on Rockabye and Bird of Paradise, Producer Selznick has accomplished great economy by reducing RKO's average production costs by nearly $100,000. In Bill of Divorcement he launched a new star. Katharine Hepburn, something which RKO had been trying unsuccessfully to do for three years. He hired able writers like Clemence Dane, Rosamond Lehmann, G. B. Stern to make more "adult" pictures, employed interior decorators like Hobe Erwin to make RKO sets look like fashion plates. Most recent Selznick coup was beating the rest of Hollywood's producers in the race to acquire the services of Broadway's newest matinee idol, Francis Lederer. Cynara (United Artists--Samuel Goldwyn). One moral of Cynara might be that it is highly injudicious for a promising young London barrister like Jim Warlock (Ronald Colman) to dine in a Soho restaurant with a mildly lecherous old bachelor like the Hon. John Tring (Henry Stephenson), particularly if the barrister's charming wife (Kay Francis) has just gone to Italy for a month. It is Tring who suggests making friends with two shopgirls at the next table. It is Warlock who gets involved with one of them (Phyllis Barry) because she is accessible and he is unsophisticated. It might have turned out harmlessly if the shopgirl had not committed suicide when Clemency Warlock's return from Italy meant that the affair had to end. Cynara starts with Jim Warlock trying to explain his actions to Clemency. It ends with Warlock boarding a boat for Africa alone and with the Hon. John Tring arriving just in time to persuade Clemency to follow.

The simplicity of the story, the fact that its elements have been used in the cinema a thousand times before, make it easy to overlook the fact that Cynara is a most unusual picture. This is not because it possesses the surface excellences--sensitive direction, by King Vidor, and more than competent acting--with which shrewd old Samuel Goldwyn quite often equips his productions. It is because Cynara presents, with sombre thoughtfulness, a situation which the cinema almost always handles blatantly ; and because the values which it involves, while not particularly subtle, are wholly unlike those which U. S. cinema audiences are usually called upon to comprehend. Good shot: Phyllis Barry--a clever young actress whom Producer Goldwyn admired last year when she was playing in a Hollywood musical comedy--in a theatre with Colman, laughing at Charlie Chaplin. The Devil Is Driving (Paramount) is another chapter in Paramount's current saga of crime & punishment, dealing with misbehavior in the garage and the nasty methods of automobile thieves. These thieves are not adept. When they steal a "classy closed job" they drive it so fast that even traffic policemen notice them; in trying to reach their base of operations, the Metropolitan Garage, they run down a small child (Dickie Moore) in a toy roadster. His father is the garage manager (James Gleason), his uncle is a chipper young mechanic (Edmund Lowe). The father gets killed in spectacular fashion for trying to avenge his son's mishap. Edmund Lowe, assisted by the chief automobile thief's warm-hearted mistress (Wynne Gibson), evens the score without too much difficulty.

The toy automobile belonging to Dickie Moore can be identified as a death car the instant it appears on the floor of Metropolitan Garage. This and other paraphernalia in The Devil Is Driving--an airshaft into which a sedan topples, a narrow two-way ramp full of blind corners--make it a peculiarly stagey expose. The garage is an interesting and elaborate caution to curious motorists. In addition to its ramps and airshafts, it contains a mechanic stupider than most real ones (Guinn Williams), a speakeasy with onyx bar, a suite of offices in which a racketeer (Alan Dinehart) operates with the assistance of a dumb monster (George Rosener) and a paint shop in the attic where purloined vehicles can be made unrecognizable in three and one-quarter minutes. Fast Life (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is a flagrantly foolish little picture in which Sandy Norton (William Haines) wins a big speedboat race with his coy fiancee (Madge Evans) sitting beside him and a large crowd cheering, in Avalon Bay off Catalina Island, Calif. Sandy is a young inventor and ex-sailor who finances the installation of a special carburetor in his Miss Victory by boarding yachts and robbing their owners. It is giving away no secret to tell how the race turns out because by the time it happens you are likely to be waiting, not to see who wins, but to find out how obnoxious Haines can become in his characterization of Sandy.

Unless they are particularly enthusiastic about speedboats, of which the film contains a few good shots, there is no special reason for adults to see Fast Life. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's opinion of the juvenile audiences for whom the film was evidently intended can be inferred from a comedy sequence in which Sandy's best friend (Cliff Edwards) describes the bed in which Sandy's fiancee will be situated if she marries Sandy's rival.

The Match King (Warner). Sooner or later the cinema, which has already adapted one of Author Theodore Dreiser's books and is soon to adapt another (Jennie Gerhardt), will investigate the possibilities of The Financier. When this happens the banking business may get the treatment it deserves from the cinema, which The Match King flagrantly neglects to give it. How the career of the late Ivar Kreuger, on which this picture is based, could possibly seem colorless and stupid you will not be able to guess until you have seen Warren William, the imitation John Barrymore, wrestling with a story that wobbles about the capitals of Europe. Instead of developing the exciting material which such doings as Kreuger's offer to the cinema, the producers made their tycoon, Paul Kroll, an arrogant, chipper, not particularly clever swindler. His formula is simple: he borrows money, then borrows twice as much from someone else to pay it back. He gets a briefcase full of bonds by murdering a gangster, forges certificates for $40,000,000 worth of bank stock and differs from the typical villain in a cinema melodrama mainly because of his penchant for cynic maxims. Sample: "Bankers and pawnbrokers are always reluctant to lend money to those who need it most."

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