Picture Play Magazine (Jul - Dec 1929)

The Screen in Review the pampered society girl and the rough miner. It is an ostrich plume in their respective caps that they have been able to do it believably. In this they are immensely aided by the actors. Kay Johnson, on the occasion of her debut in pictures, gives a breathtaking performance of sheer beauty. Sensitive, eloquent, gayly humorous, agonized, tragic, she reaches perfection so often that one sits hack and defies her to miss a step in her marvelous play upon the emotion-. Charles Bickford, also from the stage and a debutant, too, is the miner. His performance could not he bettered, his stalwart honesty so convincing that it springs from inner conviction rather than any apparent histrionism. Julia Kaye, heard for the first time, is amusingly feline and her light, expressive voice fits perfectly the characters she usually plays. Conrad Nagel, as Roger, is at his best, and from time to time the spectator is treated to sharply etched bits of fine acting by Muriel McCormac. Leslie Fenton, Robert Edeson, and Jane Keckley, and pleasing glimpses of Joel McCrea, Nancy Dover, and Scott Kolk. Murder in the First Degree. Once again the craze for musical comedy not only relegates a strong, dramatic situation to the background, but deliberately stifles it. This artistic crime occurs in "The Great Gabbo," which should have been a brilliant picture but isn't, even though a fortune has been spent on prancing chorines and languid figurantes in spectacular settings, some of them in color, all to the end of bringing the "Follies" to the "sticks," I suppose But the screen has not yet succeeded in reproducing precisely the sumptuous glamour of a Ziegfeld show. So that's that. Betty What remains of the story after the interruptions of pageantry and dancing, concerns Gal^bo. a ventriloquist, cruel, domineering, a super-egoist, whose assistant, Mary, is devoted to him. They struggle along in cheap theaters until the inevitable occurs. Gabbo gets on the big time and eventually is the stellar attraction of musical comedy. Meanwhile Mary has been dispensed with, but she too rises and coincidence brings them together in the same show. After a struggle with himself. Gabbo realizes that he loves her and that he has never been happy without her. The dramatic climax, such as it is, consists of nothing more startling than Mary's revelation of her marriage to Frank, a singer in the troupe, and Gabbo's agonized withdrawal. Naturally his anguish is intensified by the discovery of Mary's bad taste in preferring Don Douglas to Erich von Stroheim. Missed opportunities in the picture center around the character of Gabbo, a figure of fascinating complexities hardly suggested in the treatment accorded him by scenarist and director. Outwardly cruel and hard, heis at heart tender, poetic. Terrified by what he knows to be his real self, he conceals it from the world — all but Otto, his dummy, to whom he pours out his heart and who, through the words Gabbo puts into his mouth becomes more human and lovable than his master. Surely an interesting character study this Gabbo. but his inner conflict is hardly more than suggested, all the care having been lavished on the musical comedy stuff. However, it is hardly a negligible picture and Mr. Stroheim's Gabbo is, as might be expected, unlike the role would have been had any one else played it. Furthermore his voice, heard for the first time, isn't nearly so Teutonic as expected. Betty Compson, as Mary, plays a backstage role familiarly. Compson and Erich von Stroheim share honors with a ventriloquist's dummy in "The Great Gabbo." For Those Who Know. "The Lady Lies" is a picture to smack one's lips over. It is enormously intelligent in every particular — story, direction, dialogue, acting — and it has the additional virtue of novelty. There's nothing hackneyed or Hollywoodish in the drama of a father whose children, hardly out of the nursery, decide to break up his liaison with a lady outside the social pale. Nor is there anything routine in the acting of Walter Huston, as the father, and Claudette Colbert, as the lady. It is impressively simple, sincere, modern. Xot only should it be seen by every fan. but it should also be observed reverently and a little fearfully by the majority of the ladies and gentlemen of tlie screen who have recently broken into speech. for it is an augury of the new standard acting is attaining, and proof that speech can be free of elocutionary taint vet possess the polish and expressiveness that come only from cultivation and long practice. This is true equally of Mr. Huston and Miss Colbert, but as this is the hitter's second dialogue picture it is doubly refreshing to record her complete success and to wax jubilant over her photographic values, more apparent now than in "The Hole in the Wall." In every respeel Miss Colbert is a "find" of purest ray serene. One hopes that her allegiance to the stage will at least be temporarily lessened in order that she may make not only an occasional picture, but frequent one-. Her role is unusual. Joyce Roamer, a charming girl in a smart shop, permits Robert Rossiter, a widower, to provide her with an apartment because they love each other. Hut when his fourteen-year-old son becomes aware of the affair and tricks her into coming to see him. she is made to realize that she stands between tin