The New Pictures

A Star Is Born (United Artists) starts by making the point that one girl in a hundred thousand who go to Hollywood to be stars becomes one. It then examines the career of the exception--Esther Victoria Blodgett (Janet Gaynor) who, the day she arrives on the Coast, financed by her grandmother's nest egg, tiptoes into the outer lobby of Grauman's Chinese Theatre and stands tremulously in the cement footprints of her favorite actor, Norman Maine. From this point on, the story of A Star Is Born does not differ in superficial outline from the story that has been told a hundred times, usually as an excuse for weak screen musicals.

It does differ--as Esther Blodgett is supposed to differ from her competitors--in essentials. Trenchantly directed by William Wellman who, with Robert Carson, conceived the story from which Carson, Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell wrote the screen play, handsomely photographed in the Technicolor which its producer, David Oliver Selznick, is pioneering with increasingly fortunate results, it emerges as a brilliant, honest and unfailingly exciting picture which, in the welter of verbiage about Hollywood heretofore contributed by stage and screen, stands as the last word and the best.

Not until, with three weeks rent due at her boardinghouse, she gets a job as waitress at a party given by Producer Oliver Niles (Adolphe Menjou), does Esther encounter her hero in the flesh. By this time, like the rest of Hollywood, she is aware that Norman Maine (Fredric March) is an habitual drunkard whose dipsomaniac pranks are an intolerable nuisance or an aspect of his charm, depending on the point of view. To Esther, whom Maine accosts in the kitchen, escorts home and brings to the studio for a screen test, they are presumably the latter. To Niles and his glowering pressagent (Lionel Stander), they are definitely the former.

Maine's elopement with Esther, by this time rechristened Vicki Lester, is the prelude to an ecstatic honeymoon in a trailer.

When they get back to their Hollywood villa, complete with swimming pool and swans in the duck pond, Maine learns that in her next picture his wife will play opposite Niles's newest male star and that his own halcyon days in Hollywood are over.

The private tragedies of Hollywood cinemactors are something which the rest of the world, except possibly the readers of cinemagazines, can take in its stride.

It is precisely this point of view as contrasted with Norman Maine's own evaluation of his decline and its effect on his wife that gives the latter portion of A Star Is Born its effectiveness. The drunken speech in which Maine betrays his jealousy when his wife gets an Academy Award; his sojourn in a sanatorium to recover from the jitters; his fist fight with Niles's pressagent at Santa Anita race track, are related with superlative detachment. They lead up to the climactic scene in which sunset on the Pacific--a magnificent shot which is possibly the best individual justification of Technicolor yet seen on the screen--tempts Maine to an appropriately exhibitionistic suicide, leaving Esther to a Hollywood funeral in which an admirer steals her veil.

For Janet Gaynor, whose artistic growth in the past five years has not been noticeable, A Star Is Born supplies a role comparable to her Seventh Heaven (1927), but it is really Fredric March whose casting was a Selznick master stroke. An intelligent actor who studies his roles carefully, March's work in the past has often had, perhaps on this account, an elusive but annoying artificiality. In A Star Is Born this false note becomes precisely the true one required to make his performance in the role of actor the best since his similar job in The Royal Family. Good sequence: Maine delivering amiable insults to his sanatorium attendant--christened "Cuddles" after Bing Crosby's bull in Rhythm on the Range.

Thunder in the City (Columbia) is the meaningless title of a story about a U. S. ballyhoo artist who turns England topsyturvy promoting a new metal named magnalite. Gash-mouthed Edward G. Robinson plays the role in his customary Napoleonic manner. As genial Dan Armstrong, he lands penniless in London, bluffs his way into an option on the magnalite mines, installs a duke as board chairman, sends fleets of blimps over London carrying magnalite signs, soon sells all his stock to enthusiastic herds of subway riders. At this point another capitalist gets his hands on the only process that makes magnalite commercially usable. Faced with a long-drawn fight for control which will ruin all the little stockholders, grandstanding Dan Armstrong makes the best grandstand play of all.

This smoothly unfolded comedy is notable in only one respect: It is the U. S. debut of a 20-year-old, five-foot-three, 105-lb. Viennese girl with grey eyes and brown hair, using the name Luli Deste. Thunder in the City gives her opportunity to demonstrate that these qualities photograph extremely well. She is currently established in Hollywood with three Afghan hounds. Divorced wife of the late Baron Godfried Hohenberg, Luli Deste once understudied Elizabeth Bergner in The Last of Mrs. Cheyney, ran a rug-weaving concern in London before she started in European cinema a year ago. Given to exotic mannerisms, she dotes on cooking such dishes as saddle of stag, pigeon stuffed with quail.

Good Old Soak (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Old Clem Hawley (Wallace Beery) is a likable small-town toper, whose worst sin is getting drunk with his crony, Al (Ted Healy), and Mrs. Hawley's hired girl. Young Clem Hawley (Eric Linden) is an obnoxious young bank clerk who steals his mother's savings to repay money embezzled from the till to buy summer ermine for a night club dancer. Ostracized by his wife and suspected of his son's theft, Old Clem Hawley shows what he is made of. He explodes his son's romance with the dancer, finds the money to pay off Young Clem's thievings, sends it to his wife with a message that he is leaving town. At the station, Clem hopes his family will turn up before he boards the train. They do.

As adapted by A. E. Thomas from a Don Marquis play, Good Old Soak is a minor vehicle for Actor Beery's Piltdown pathos and the efforts of a supporting cast which somehow seem even below MGM's post-Thalberg standard. Typical shot: Beery rubbing his nose.

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