New Play in Manhattan

Leave Her to Heaven (by John van Druten; produced by Dwight Deere Wiman) brought Actress Ruth Chatterton to Broadway for the first time in nearly 15 years. It was not much of a homecoming. Playwright van Druten's idea of celebrating was to bring on the stage some distinctly unattractive people who do decidedly unsavory things and come to extremely unpleasant ends. And he did his best to make the play as dull as it was depressing.

Leave Her to Heaven tells of a middle-aged married woman who has an affair with her young chauffeur. An insanely jealous youth, he bashes in the husband's skull with a mallet. The wife, to save her lover, confesses to the crime; the lover confesses also. He is convicted and sentenced to be hanged; she is acquitted and kills herself.

A straight-faced play, Leave Her to Heaven has the effect of melodrama without the excitement, the violence of love without the poignancy. Apparently based on a real murder case, it suffers thereby from having no guiding idea behind it. Whatever it was meant to show, all it proves is that messy lives can make messy plays.

Gum-chewing, fuzzy-voiced Actress Chatterton, 46, dimpled her way to fame on Broadway as Little Orphan Judy in soppy Daddy Long-Legs, kept climbing with young-girl parts in Come Out of the Kitchen, Mary Rose. Leaving Broadway in 1925, she acted for a while in San Francisco, wound up in Hollywood. There, in the early days of the talkies, she clicked as one of the few who knew how to talk. There she was as much typed for fallen women roles (Madame X, Once a Lady, Frisco Jenny) as she had been for sweet young things on Broadway. After her great cinema success, Dodsworth, she deserted Hollywood for foreign studios, early last year returned to the U. S.

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