The Garden of Allah

(See front cover)

Color will be the cinema's prime problem for 1937. Last week the country's biggest cinemansion, New York's Radio City Music Hall, exhibited the best answer to the problem that Hollywood has made in 1936. It was The Garden of Allah, third cinema version of Robert Hichens' 1907 best seller, produced by Selznick International Pictures, Inc. in six months for $2,200,000. In full color, against a blazing background of North African (Arizona) and, The Garden of Allah, directed by Richard Boleslawski, exhibits Marlene Dietrich, Charles Boyer and an imposing supporting cast in a story whose most important feature is the moral: "You can't win."

Marlene Dietrich is a wealthy orphan named Domini Enfilden, who proposes to the Mother Superior of the convent where she was brought up a difficult question. "What," Domini asks, "am I to do?" "Go away . . . perhaps, to the desert," says the Mother Superior. This is bad advice. First person Domini meets in the desert is Boris Andtovsky (Charles Boyer), a renegade Trappist monk out to discover, after breaking his vow of lifelong silence, just what it is that makes the world go round. When he has scraped acquaintance with Domini in a night club, they go riding. Without telling her that the only job that he has ever held was that of liqueur cook in the monastery, Boris proposes marriage. Domini's elderly friend, Father Roubier, performs the ceremony.

Main thing Domini and Boris have in common, conveniently for Producer Selznick's cameras, is a wish to see the desert. They do it in a caravan whose manager is a bubbling young Algerian named Batouch (Joseph Schildkraut). Tripping about the North Sahara they enjoy life to the full until one night a French Army officer, lost with his troop, happens on their camp. When Batouch brings in a bottle of the Trappist liqueur Lagarnine, the officer remembers where he has met Boris before. Without so much as saying, "It's a small world after all," he goes off in a rage.

Next caller at the Androvsky tent is their mutual friend Count Anteoni (Basil Rathbone). He tells Domini what her husband is and she tells Boris that she knows his secret. For the next 20 minutes on the screen, Boris struggles with his lower nature. When last seen he is padding uphill to the monastery. Domini is driving off alone.

Sad, serene and somewhat silly, The Garden of Allah belongs to that dignified class of pictures which reviewers customarily praise for the music and photography. Unfortunately for Hollywood, cinemaddicts go to the theatre not to see the latest wonders of cinematography but to be entertained. That in this case both music, by Max Steiner, and color photography, by Cameraman W. Howard Greene and Color Designer Lansing C. Holden, are genuinely superb, will doubtless not suffice to interest 1936 in two young lovers who, with money to burn, can apparently find nothing better to do than brood about the life hereafter. If The Garden of Allah, best example of color photography the cinema has so far contrived, is a box-office hit, it will be because of its stars.

That color will not come into its own until producers can forget about it has been the chief lesson of every colored film to date. Selznick International may well be the first company to become familiar enough with this medium to treat it with proper carelessness. Unhurried by such outside spurs as the change in theatre equipment that transformed sound overnight from a pipe dream to a necessity, other producers are still wary of color as an expensive and perhaps unhealthy precedent. Selznick International, after a board meeting in which Backer John Hay ("Jock") Whitney was re-elected chairman, Producer Selznick re-elected president, last week announced an expansion in its current program. It will make twelve features instead of five in 1937. Six of the twelve will be in Technicolor, in which Backer Whitney has a major interest. This will be about one-third of Hollywood's total 1937 color output.

If The Garden of Allah's weak point is its story, its strong point is its female star. In the first place, to Marlene Dietrich's golden hair and porcelain skin, color is more complimentary than it has been to any other actress who has so far tried it. In the second place, the North African desert is her specialty. In the third place, if there is any actress in Hollywood whom cinemaddicts have always yearned to see in the flesh--to which color film is the closest practical approach--Marlene Dietrich is the one.

There are more beautiful women and better actresses in Hollywood than Marlene Dietrich. But no other embodies so perfectly that elusive combination of qualities--variously defined as glamour, personality or, even, color--which added to less subtle requisites makes a beautiful actress a Star. Marlene Dietrich is not so good a tragedienne as Greta Garbo. She is inferior as a fashion plate to Constance Bennett, and less potent at the box office than Shirley Temple. What they are not she is--the ultimate refinement of a rare and delicate artifact, the distilled essence of a Movie Actress. Extremely commonplace is the background of Mary Magdalene von Losch, born in Weimar, Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, Dec. 27, 1904. Her father, Edward von Losch, lieutenant in a regiment of Prussian Grenadiers, was stationed there. In 1915 von Losch was killed at Kovno on the Russian Front. After the War Marlene decided to try acting, changed her name to Dietrich, enrolled in Max Reinhardt's school in Berlin. To get money she worked as an extra for UFA. Her first turn of fortune came when she met Rudolf Sieber, a blond, stocky assistant director. He picked her out of a mob scene and gave her a lorgnette. The lorgnette made what is known as a "halation"--a spot of light reflected upon the camera lens and magnified. Nowadays cameramen watch scenes for halation. When they find them they blur the bright spot with putty or paint or move a light to avoid the reflection. No putty was daubed on Dietrich's lorgnette. It attracted attention to her. In the next picture she got a better part. Sieber worked hard trying to push her ahead. After a few months she married him.

Things went well for the Siebers. Marlene got six months' work in The Great Baritone, a stage production in Vienna. She took some time out for the birth of her daughter, Maria, in 1925. About a year later she got a second lead in a musical comedy, It's in the Air. She began to get starring roles in German pictures. Alternating them with stage work, she was a guest star in the Berliner Theatre when Josef von Sternberg saw her. After the show he went backstage--the squat, little man with a sharp face and Mephistophelean mustache. The strange career of Josef von Sternberg was just coming into its exotic bloom. Born Joe Stern in Vienna, Austria in 1894, he had risen from the cutting room, gambled his savings in a freelance silent picture, Salvation Hunters. Fame had come with The Last Command, Dragnet, Docks of New York, The Case of Lena Smith, Thunderbolt. He was in Germany to make one picture for UFA. He had been looking for a leading woman. He had one major requirement: she must have beautiful legs, and a minor reservation: he preferred that she be unknown. Marlene fitted the first condition so perfectly that von Sternberg dropped his reservation. He cast her in the lead of The Blue Angel. When he returned to the U. S. he got her a contract with Paramount.

This began the strangest director-star relationship in the history of U. S. cinema. In a few months was brought about the transformation of Mrs. Sieber. From an awkward, frail girl, visibly awed by the new world into which fate had thrust her, she became the purveyor of calculated glamour, icy and generous by turns, distant, temperamental, mysterious. Part of this was the result of coaching by von Sternberg, part of it the changes in her own ego wrought by the amazing publicity campaign organized for her by Paramount. Before Morocco, her next picture, was released Hollywood gazed astonished at a series of billboards in which Dietrich and her limbs were formally presented to the U. S. Writers, columnists created for von Sternberg's star the sobriquet he had envisaged, "Legs" Dietrich.

Publicity alone can never make a star. Publicity plus personality--and the star is half made. Add to these assets one real hit and the trick is done. Morocco--succinctly described by Variety as a "boxoffice socko"--was the hit. Von Sternberg directed it. He followed with Dishonored and Shanghai Express. The new contract which he negotiated for himself and Dietrich specified that she was to be paid $125,000 per picture--a record at that time. Von Sternberg got a percentage of the gross. The contract was extraordinary for provisions giving von Sternberg and Dietrich complete choice of writers, cutters, story material, technicians. No publicity could be released which had not been personally checked by them. They had achieved the dream which, to the average hard-working trouper or director, seems like a mirage: complete dictatorship of their professional lives.

If the change in Dietrich was astounding, that which took place in von Sternberg, though less evident, is no less interesting. The girl whom he had turned in record time into a world celebrity had paradoxically trebled his own fame. She was a perfect Trilby for his staccato, 14-hour-a-day Svengali. Impatient of routine, abrupt with strangers and remote with studio officials, Dietrich would tolerate the most brutal type of public correction from von Sternberg. It was common enough for her to go through a scene 15 or 16 times before he was satisfied with it. None of this seemed to make any difference to the almost psychopathic esteem in which she held him.

Their personal relationship, at one time apparently tender, changed to a purely professional and far more binding one. Dietrich went out with other men, but on important Hollywood occasions von Sternberg was still her escort. It was at his counsel that she let Mamoulian direct her in Song of Songs. The picture was not wholly a success. After this partial failure Dietrich returned to von Sternberg. They made The Scarlet Empress, based on the life of Catherine of Russia. It was a picture characterized by a peculiar violence of background and a remarkable tedium of pace. By making a much better picture on the same subject, Elisabeth Bergner rubbed the first bloom off the von Sternberg-Dietrich prestige. Still there was no hint of rift until with dramatic abruptness von Sternberg told an Associated Press reporter he was going to break with Dietrich. He said he had done all he could to further her career, that he considered he would hinder her development. Dietrich read the story in the press. For two days on the set (they were making The Devil Is a Woman) she would not speak to him. Later they were reconciled.

No less remarkable than her relationship to von Sternberg is her family life. She is still married to Rudolf Sieber. He followed her to the U. S., bringing little Maria, after Marlene's establishment at Paramount, helps her in many ways. He soothes her in emergencies, advises her on parts, costumes and household matters. They have occasionally been seen together publicly--Sieber with a feminine companion, Dietrich escorted by her current favorite. She seeks her husband's advice on business but leaves final decisions to her agent, Harry Eddington.

In London, where she is currently making Knight Without Armor for Alexander Korda, she last month went to the premiere of Romeo and Juliet with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Police were called in to quiet the mob. as they had been at two previous openings she attended. Film technicians speak of her knowledge of photography. On the set, she is good-humored, assiduous. In Knight Without Armor occurs a bathtub scene. While it was being made one day (in England), she slipped, sprawled, spread-eagled naked before the camera crew. Everyone was flustered except Dietrich. She laughed, picked herself up, popped back in the tub (see cut). During the production of The Garden of Allah she could tell whether the take would be good or bad by the intensity of the light on her face. She tested personally her dress materials and makeup under lights.

Her pay has risen steadily. She got $200,000 for Allah. Figured on a picture rather than a weekly basis, she is Hollywood's highest-paid woman, the highest-salaried woman in the world. There is no doubt of her being a loving mother. Old friends tell how anxiously, when Maria was abroad, Dietrich waited for a letter containing the child's first tooth. When at last the denticle arrived Dietrich put it in her mouth and carried it there for several days. Despite the scintillating quality of her male escorts, the world's No. 1 glamour girl is definitely lonely. Acquaintances believe that her best friend is her hairdresser, Nellie Manley.

Tarzan Escapes (Metro -Goldwyn-Mayer) has one striking difference from its predecessor, Tarzan and His Mate, Mate Maureen O'Sullivan, who once frolicked through the jungle almost nude, now wears a tunic far more modest than most bathing suits. Despite the Legion of Decency, however, Tarzan's mate is still "Miss Jane Parker" to the whites who journey into Africa to find her.

They are her cousins, Rita and Eric Parker, who want Jane's assistance in claiming a fortune that has been left her. They launch a safari under the guidance of a bring-'em-back-alive hunter named Captain Fry who plots to capture Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller). After the usual adventures, they find Tarzan and Jane, move in with them in their treetop "town house," whose butler is Cheetah, the chimpanzee. Cheetah understands Jane's words far better than does Tarzan. Though they have been living together for four years, Tarzan has been able to learn, only a few phrases of English. As a yodeler he is in better voice than ever. Inevitable develop ments include a fight with a crocodile, underwater swimming, treetop acrobatics. Eventually Tarzan is trapped by villainous Captain Fry. He escapes in time to rescue the party from the fiendish Ganeloni tribe, achieves sadistic revenge on Captain Fry in a swampy cave full of giant lizards.

Cinemaddicts with good memories of MGM's two previous Tarzan pictures, though they may feel that they have seen Tarzan Escapes before, will find it richly entertaining. Good shots: Tarzan's elephant-power elevator; Cheetah laughing; the Ganelonis ingeniously tearing a captive limb from limb.

Three Men On A Horse (Warner Brothers). Oiwin Trowbridge (Frank McHugh), the greeting-card poet, originating obscurely in the brain of John Cecil Holm, sharpened and clarified by Playwright George Abbott, has attained the gigantic stature that comes to a stage character with 96 weeks on Broadway, five road companies in the U. S., one in Australia and successful presentations in London and Paris. Oiwin's prestige made him a serious problem to Hal Walk's, Warners' production boss, and his able aide, Sam Bischoff. They owned the picture rights to the play. Warners had backed the Manhattan production. But what to do with Oiwin? The cinema presented untold possibilities for expanding his talent as a poet and his powers to divine the speed of horses. Yet there lay danger. The slightest alteration might impair Oiwin's magic, hilariously tested at so many box offices.

Wisely, Messrs. Walk's & Bischoff left him just the same. Even the sets are careful replicas of those used on the stage. Oiwin begins his zoom to greatness when his wife (Carol Hughes) finds a small black book in his extra pants. Heckled by her suspicion that the female names therein are not the names of horses--and his brother-in-law's belief that they are horses and that he has made a fortune betting on them--Oiwin gets drunk. In the bar of the Lavillere Hotel he gives a casual race-tip to three starving horse-players--Charlie (Allen Jenkins), Patsy (Sam Levene) and Frankie (Teddy Hart). He is being sick offstage during those moments when the selections in his small black book, heavily backed by his new friends, come romping home. What happens after his return from the men's room is a four-cornered chase. Oiwin is trying to write 67 Mother's Day greeting-card orders for delivery to his employer, Mr. Carver (Guy Kibbee), Charlie, Patsy and Frankie are trying to capitalize Oiwin as a race-selector. Mr. Carver is combating the horse-players, whom he mistakes for a rival greeting-card combine, and Oiwin's wife, in Ozone Heights, is getting the police to find her husband.

Skillfully directed by Mervyn LeRoy, adorned with two members of the original stage cast (Teddy Hart and Sam Levene), Three Men On A Horse is more than just a very funny picture. It has the authentic lilt and shuffle of that Broadway half-world whose deflated, hard-packed mirth had had no equal interpretation since the late Ring Lardner. Best scenes : the Lavillere staff, including the bartender, the bellhop and the maid, working on Oiwin's greeting-card orders; Patsy's girl Mabel (Joan Blondell) keeping Oiwin from going; home by showing him the specialty she did in the Follies.

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