World Film and Television Progress (1938)

''Bunch of frustrated peoph 'Petrifies her leading men "Goes Innocently lo Town The following list is suggested as the pick of the April releases, whether you want realism, romance, sentiment, or just plain slap-up action pictures. Dead End This is Goldwyn's reverential translation of the Broadway stage success, dealing with the lives of a bunch of frustrated people down by New York's East River. The story concerns an architect (Joel McCrea) who dreams of better things but never achieves them, a shopgirl (Sylvia Sidney) whose shoes are worn out with picketing, Baby-Face Martin (Humphrey Bogart), a local killer, who comes back after ten years to find his girl walking the streets, and his mother hating and disowning him, a bunch of toffs from the adjoining hotel, forced into this unsavoury area by building operations, and a crew of ragged boys of the streets, Baby-Face Martins in embryo, who live like wharf-rats, stealing and hiding, bullying and swimming. The boys are the picture. They have been lugged across a continent to recreate in Hollywood the peculiar filth and frankness of the Manhattan tenements. Their language has been toned down for the microphones, but their faces tell unprintable things to the camera. They are the real stuff, and not even Mr. Goldwyn can glamourise them, pastmaster though he is in this peculiar art. The film itself, except for two first-rate camera sequences, is more theatre than cinema. It is played in one vast tenement set, and sutlers, at moments, from claustrophobia. There is no brilliant coup de cinema, like the barrel-organ climax of Winterset, to resolve and excite the final moments. But within these limits it is a remarkable film, hard-hitting and honest. The sound-track, separately recorded in Manhattan, carries all the bedlam of the East Side river-front. Bogart is Baby-Face Martin, Dillinger, Legs Diamond and all the rest — the composite Public Enemy. The small parts arc alive. The scene frequently crawls with horror. Dead End is a precis of an urgent document, if not quite a first-rank film. Marie Wa lewska Marie Walewska is unique because it allows a leading man to out-act Garbo. As the Polish Countess Walewska, Napoleon's secret mistress and his ministering angel, 34 CA. Lejeune Selects The MONTHS RELEASES Garbo stands deliberately back in the shadows and leaves Charles Boyer to take the spotlight. There is even one close-up that shows the full face of Boyer and the back of Garbo's neck. It's amazing. It's good, too, ensuring a full Garbo picture for the first time in fifteen years. There is something about Garbo, like Medusa, that customarily petrifies her leading men. Up-to-date, to her great distress, she has petrified sixteen of them. Boyer, an actor of some experience both in his own country and America, has resolutely refused to be petrified. He has looked at his part and not at the star, found it good, found it, in fact, better than Garbo's, and gone at it hammer and tongs, the star standing by and encouraging. The result is a rich, moving, and wellbalanced picture, a private life of Napoleon Bonaparte that carries him right through from the height of his triumphs in Poland to the final embarkation for St. Helena. Part fact, part fiction, this secret love-story is genuinely moving. You feel, which is the ultimate test of any good work of fiction, that if the thing isn't true, it certainly should have been. Stand-in There are no jokes about Hollywood as good as the jokes that Hollywood makes about itself. Stand-in, until the last romantic (and typically Hollywood) compromise, is one of the best of them. The central thesis of the film is rich in satire. It presents the mathematical expert o\' a New York banking house (Leslie Howard) engaged in a statistical research into the methods of a failing film studio. Spectacles pushed high on nose, notebook in hand, this financial Mr. Deeds goes innocently to town. Tossing out such remarks as "Who is this Miss Temple? I've heard the name several times to-day. Oh, well, it's not important", he works conscientiously through the books, queries this and budgets that. Just as the film is getting to a high point of social comment, though, he spoils the whole show by falling in love with a professional stand-in (Joan Blondell). The Awful Truth The Awful Truth has just won for Leo McCarey the Academy award for the best direction of the year. McCarey, you'll remember, was responsible for Ruggles of Red Gap, Make Way for To-Morrow, and the early Marx Brothers pictures. It is a light comedy, saved by a hair's breadth from the prevailing crazy manner, of the six months between the interlocutory decree and the final divorce in the lives of an otherwise ideally mated young couple. Questions involved are such practical issues as the custody of the dog, the services of the common family lawyer, the choice of a new dancing partner, the division of property. Irene Dunne and Cary Grant discuss these problems until divorce seems, on the whole, more involved than marriage, and they reach an amicable settlement just on the deadline. Featured largely in the picture is one, Mr. Smith, alias Asta of The Thin Man, ne Skippy the wire-haired fox terrier. Ralph Bellamy, tackling comedy for the first time as an oil man from Oklahama, supports Mr. Smith in the best of the fun. Hopalon<r Rides Again Paramount' s HopA long Cas.sidy series has been built up on the rarish idea that westerns should have the same production quality as straight dramatic features. All the Cassidy pictures are clean-cut, wellphotographed, strong on the sound track.