Musicomedies of the Week

In the current revival of cinemas with music, Warner Brothers, who claim that they started the cycle with 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933, favor backstage romances, staged with super-Ziegfeldian extravagance. Samuel Goldwyn surrounds Eddie Cantor with girls and animals. Universal, sceptical of the new vogue, was last week completing a cheap ($100,000) cinemusicomedy, partly financed by two Manhattan shoestring producers and produced at Paramount's Long Island lot, which has been disused for two years.

Trend toward cinemas with music was indicated by two which opened last week:

College Humor (Paramount) is a frantic little absurdity about an institution called Midwest (football rival: Yarwood) where Jack Oakie is the dormitory dunce, Lona Andre the campus belle, Richard Aden a neurotic footballer, and Bing Crosby the professor of music. With that inappropriate calm which is his chief distinction, Crosby yodels songs called "Learn to Croon," "Play Ball," "Moon-struck," ''The Old Ox Road." Paramount, more versatile than its competitors, has two types of musical pictures. Those in which Maurice Chevalier is directed by Ernst Lubitsch are for metropolitan consumption. The others, of which this is a fair sample, contain as many radio clowns and crooners as possible, are intended to delight rural cinemaddicts whose tastes in diversion have been shaped by wireless. Thus, College Humor contains George Burns and Gracie Allen.

Melody Cruise, RKO's first musical production, is built around Charles Ruggles-- an expert comedian but no singer--in the character of a gentle bon vivant with a perpetual case of jitters. He embarks from Manhattan to San Francisco, has his trip made hideous by two chorus girls whom he discovers in his room after the ship has sailed. The main liabilities of Melody Cruise are the performers technically called "juveniles"--Phil Harris, who sings well but looks like Harry Richman with curvature of the nose, and Helen Mack. There are two pleasing songs,--''He Isn't the Marrying Kind" and "Isn't This a Night for Love"--attractive shipboard interiors, and photographic novelties like a shot of the sky with stars assembling themselves into a bar of music. Comment by Mordaunt Hall, onetime British Army officer who writes astonished cinema reviews for the New York Times: "One might hazard that it is a film in which the wizardry of the camera 'is the thing.' "

The New Pictures

Baby Face (Warner) is notable mainly because, when the Hays organization ordered portions of it changed, it caused one of the studio rows between Darryl Zanuck and Harry Warner as a result of which Zanuck quit Warners, formed a new company called Twentieth Century Pictures, Inc. to release films through United Artists. A morose and timidly salacious study of the life and loves of a saloon keeper's daughter (Barbara Stanwyck), it shows her flirting to get a job in a bank, rolling an eye at the department manager, arousing the lower nature of the cashier, finally having an affair with the vice president. The cashier shoots the vice president and himself, leaving Lily Powers to marry the president. Most spurious shot: Lily's change of heart in the last reel-- when she has deserted her president-husband and started for Paris with most of the funds which he needs to save himself from jail.

Hold Your Man (MGM). Jean Harlow is the pattern for every U. S. dance hall hostess whose hair responds to dye. Clark Gable is the apotheosis of the heel.* They therefore constitute an ideal starring team for a picture, of which the aim is to romanticize the love life of a Brooklyn strumpet and a petty thief.

Eddie Hall (Clark Gable) is first seen scampering up a flight of brownstone steps to get away from a policeman. He scuttles into the first convenient room, which contains Jean Harlow taking a bath. There begins almost immediately a courtship conducted, as is customary in such cine mas, by means of cohabitation. Unfortunately, before Eddie and Ruby (Jean Harlow) have had time to become less intimately acquainted, he attempts a feat of larceny too difficult for his abilities.

When he gets out of jail, Eddie decides to try the badger game. He has Ruby invite a married admirer to the apartment, plans to break in on the couple in time to practice blackmail. Instead, overcome by jealousy, he whacks the caller on the jaw so hard he dies. Eddie runs away, Ruby goes to the reformatory. Eddie visits her, persuades an elderly colored clergyman calling on his wayward daughter to marry them in the institution's chapel. Their wedding, with policemen who have gotten wind of Eddie's presence pounding on the door, is the high point of the story. The closing shot shows Ruby and her son, who is older than he ought to be, waiting to meet Eddie when he returns from Sing Sing. She has secured for him a job in Cincinnati. He has promised to go straight.

All this is fundamentally as absurd as it sounds but much less vicious. Actually, the hero and heroine of Hold Your Man resemble characters from the Morte d'Arthur much more than their counterparts in life. The picture is based on the shrewd supposition that cinemaddicts derive a pleasant reassurance from detecting--in persons with whom they can identify themselves--noble motives for bad deeds. The fact that it is completely insincere does not imply that it was inefficiently written, by Anita Loos, directed, by Sam Wood, or acted, by Hollywood's foremost specialists in sex. It contains a few definitely first-rate shots--such as the one of Eddie, when he gets back from jail for the first time, jumping out of a taxi and glancing up to the windows of his apartment to see if anyone is there.

When Ladies Meet (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is an adaptation of last winter's play by Rachel Crothers. Like most such cinemas, it improves on its original in acting, equals it in other respects. Ann Harding is the wife who unintentionally meets the young lady novelist her publisher husband is trying, with an elaborate show of emotion, to seduce. Myrna Loy is the novelist, Robert Montgomery the airy journalist who contrives to bring the women together. After an evening of chipper conversation at a handsomely remodeled Westchester farmhouse, all of them find out where they stand including the husband (Frank Morgan) who is even more of a scamp than he appears to be. As the slightly addled hostess who presides over this difficult houseparty, Alice Brady--who was one of the cinema's prettiest ingenues 15 years ago. before she became one of Manhattan's best actresses--proves herself such an expert comedienne that she is quite likely to stay in Hollywood.

*Any incompetent or undesirable person; a hanger-on; one who pretends to a criminal ability he does not possess. (From "heeler" one who follows at the heels of another, or from "down at heel.")--American Tramp and Underworld Slang--Godfrey Irwin.

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