Hollywood Spectator (1931)

June 20, 1931 9 one that can not fail to hold the close interest of any audience. The fine performance of Bill Powell is enough in itself to make the picture worth while. ▼ ▼ I WANT TO make it clear that I enjoyed Ladies' Man thoroughly. My constant criticism of talkies as such is not based on my own preferences in screen entertainment. I am quite content to view a talkie any time if I can derive as much enjoyment from it as this Paramount production afforded me. One feature of it interested me greatly. It was the clever manner in which dialogue was eliminated and time lapses provided for by adroit cutting. “I know where we can go and be alone,” Olive Tell says to Powell. There is a fade to the two in a cafe' and we hear Miss Tell say, “That is why I am unhappy.” The whole story of her unhappiness thus becomes a part of the story, but we are spared the labor of listening to its recital. It is the fact of her unhappiness, not the cause of it, that has story value. Ladies' Man demonstrates that Paramount is becoming more proficient at making talkies. Yet the critics yawned at it, abused the story and said that Powell was wasted in it. The public’s reception of it is proving lukewarm. All this would indicate that Paramount’s hope of a prosperous future lies in its ability to make better talkies than this one. It lacks that ability because Ladies' Man is just about as good as one can be. It was not at this picture that the critics yawned. It was at talkies in general. The critics and the public alike are fed up. What I wrote late in 1928 has come to pass. I stated then, when talkies were shattering box-office records, that the public would not continue to patronize pictures in which the stories were told in dialogue. The industry laughed at me. It would be cruel of me to laugh at it now. It is suffering enough. T T T Kick In BARTLETT CormacK did a mighty fine job of screen writing when he put this Willard Mack play into shape for filming. When producers become sane, a brilliant writer like Cormack is going to team up with some capable director, the team will work without supervision, and will turn out the kind of pictures the public wants. Cormack’s strength as a screen writer lies in his ability to shape scenes in a manner that permits the camera to tell the greater part of the story. A return to satisfactory box-office conditions depends upon the extent to which this method of telling stories is developed. In writing Kick In Cormack did almost too good a job. He stuck unrelentingly to his story, as a capable writer always will, with the result that it is rather drab and depressing. The INTELLIGENT direction of Richard Wallace, a really superb performance by Regis Toomey, and the pleasing presence of Clara Bow are what give Kick In its chief entertainment value. All the members of the rather extensive cast do well. Donald Crisp is particularly effective in the role of an inspector of detectives, and Wynne Gibson handles a dramatic part with vigor and intelligence. She is a capable young woman. Leslie Fenton, always a sincere performer, gives a graphic portrayal of a dope fiend. The part played by Clara Bow is scarcely colorful enough to give the vibrant miss a chance to display all her talents, but it was a welcome change from the “It” roles that have been handed her. Y Y V Mad Parade A GOOD IDEA and good direction almost make The Mad Parade a good picture. It is the all-female photoplay presented by Herman M. Gumbin, directed by William Beaudine and featuring Evelyn Brent, Irene Rich, Louise Fazenda, Lilyan Tashman, Marceline Day, Fritzi Ridgeway, June Clyde, Elizabeth Keating, and Helen Keating. Bill Beaudine directed it admirably, but it was a staggering job to spin the tenuous story out to feature length and keep it interesting. The story deals with the heroic work done by girls in the World War, surely a subject of potential epic proportions. In its externals it has an epic quality. There are many inspiring and thrilling scenes. An air raid on a French village, the dramatic shelling of trucks driven by girls, the killing of Fritzi Ridgeway, the flight of Louise Fazenda from a dugout and her pursuit by Lilyan Tashman, and Evelyn Brent’s dash across no-man’s land — these thrills are presented on a scale and directed with an ability that make them worthy of a place in the best war picture ever made. ▼ ▼ The STORY itself is an intimate one of the love affairs of the girls we see and the men who don’t appear, but is much too trivial for the magnitude and significance of the atmosphere and background. We get the impression that the war stops every little while to give the girls an opportunity to attend to their personal affairs and to indulge in quarrels with Miss Ridgeway. There is story value in the unpopularity of Fritzi, but it is carried so far beyond its point of sufficient value that it becomes exceedingly tiresome. We must give credit to Gumbin, however, for making an earnest effort to do something on a large scale. He is a young independent producer who spends his own money in carrying out his own ideas. There is enough merit in Mad Parade to entitle it to succeed at the box-office. I quarrel with it not so much because it is a poor picture, but because it is not a better one. Y Y Y Millionaire THIS George Arliss comedy teaches us at least two things — that the public wants good acting and clean pictures. All that it has to its credit are the admirable performance of the star and the fact that it is clean and decent. For these two reasons it is doing well at the box-office. In spots the story becomes childish and it throughout has been given purely conventional direction. Its most sombre moments are when it tries hardest to be funny. Arliss always is delightful and when he is on the screen the audience is generous with its chuckles ; but when an attempt is made to provoke laughs by showing a love-sick service station attendant absent-mindedly