World Film and Television Progress (1938)

Stuart Legg <»A reviews IN This film may be part leg-show, part cheap sensation, part hack-stuff. It may be superficial and smart-aleck at a thousand points. But let there be no mistake ; behind all this a city is growing, even though it rival Corinth in wickedness. And for this reason alone In Old Chicago is the most important picture in town by a mile and Darryl F. Zanuck is to be congratulated (whether he likes it or no) on steering as near to civic education as his Hollywood upbringing will decently allow. If the picture fails to be really big (apart from its £400,000 budget) it is because Zanuck has tackled an infernally difficult theme for the first time. Building a city may be epic, but it is epic in vastly different terms from the guns and horses and moustaches that conquered the prairie. Civic victory is won with paper weapons, fair debate and — oh, horrors — even thought. Small wonder that Zanuck takes refuge in convention and hitches the city to the O'Leary family wagon. The pard cannot be expected to change all his spots overnight. The trouble with this method of interpreting a great community through half a dozen of its citizens is that every domestic gesture of the chosen few may or may not be symbolic of some p'ublic issue. It gets hard to draw the distinction. In the opening sequence OLD CHICAGO and GOLDWYN FOLLIES Patrick O'Leary and his wagon (Symbols of the Old World), being determined to make Chicago before nightfall, yield to the temptation of racing a train (Symbol of the New). At full gallop the traces break, Patrick describes a graceful curve, falls flat on his belly and is given a pious burial. Has the Old World really died, or has a troublesome old Irishman been shot out of the script that the story may proceed? And when Widow O'Leary, having started a fire that killed several thousand and did £40,000,000 worth of damage (it cost Zanuck £200,000 to re-stage, so it must have been pretty good) has the face to stand up against the horizon and make a speech about a new and finer city, we may well ask who the hell she thinks she is anyway. But these shortcomings are relatively trivial. The film is a great effort and a superbly well done job. The more I read the papers The less I comprehend Of the world and all its capers And how it all will end. So sings Sam Goldwyn's master-crooner in Sam Goldwyn's latest most supercolossal all-Technicolour musical monsterpiece. And the question raised by the sweet tenor voice crying in the wilderness is an urgent one. We have had our musicals hot and peppy; we have had them languorous and lush ; we have had them with all the regimented slickness of Hollywood at its most professional ; we have had them with Busby Berkeley's staggering talents for regurgitating chorus girls from flowers, ships, chariots and cornucopia?. But we have never had one quite like this. In something under two hours there pass across the screen the following strange delights: a portable zoo, a hunk from Traviata, a considerable portion of the city of Venice reconstructed, a ballet of the Romeo and Juliet death scene, an army of cats, a luscious west-coast bathing beach, a water-nymph ballet, a sound-stage complete with shooting outfit, a ventriloquist's doll, the Goldwyn Girls (various ensembles as advertised). enough washing to make Bermondsey on Monday afternoon look silly, an immense quantity of water from fountains, lagoons and enchanted pools, and a collection of living beings which leave the mouth agape with wonder at the achievements of Creation. Elastic enough, you say, must be the framework that holds this fantastic agglomeration together. You are right. The only conceivable figure who could become involved in such a shindy is the good old movieproducer; and a movie-producer it is, in the shape of Menjou, who strives to conduct the lunatic symphony. Bitten is producer Menjou with the idea that pictures lack human simplicity. "Waggon-loads of poets and dramatists I have", he asserts, "but 1 can't buy Humanity". He succeeds in purchasing the commodity in the form of Andrea Leeds, a film struck cutie bearing a remarkable resemblance to Janet Gaynor. A Star is Born? No, Miss Humanity is born — but the formula? are not dissimilar. Installed in Hollywood as taste-representative of America's 200 million moviegoers, Miss Humanity, expressing liberal doses of the milk of human kindness into every picture on the floor, becomes monarch of the studio. The results (summarised above) are Humanity. And the definition, in one sense at least, is not unsound. Indeed, the film provides an excellent opportunity for a close analysis of screen anatomy. One sequence of Vera Zorina's lips, in the prolonged kissing of three Cossacks, clarifies in a flash what Freud has been trying for years to tell us about erogenous /ones : in the opera we see the distressing effects of intense vocal effort on the sinews of the throat; on the bathing beach there are thighs to drive a sculptor crazy; and when it comes to Goldwyn's Girls the study is greatly facilitated by the placing of the camera a little below eyelevel throughout a whole dance number. But the purely anatomical can only be a brief stage in the whirlwind evolution of the musical. "How will it all end?" demands the plaintive crooner. We do not know, we cannot tell; but a month ago Sam Goldwyn made a significant statement. He said that he was not certain of the permanent drawing-power of the movies. He hinted that people might weary of them and prefer to spend the evening at home listening to the radio. Shrewd statement, Mr. Goldwyn. 33