Hollywood Spectator (February 29, 1936)

Hollywood Spectator Page Five Reviews by the Editor Cus Disgraceful and Nauseating KLONDIKE ANNIE, Paramount. Directed by Raoul Walsh; assistant director, David 'MacDonald; from a play by Mae West, and a story by Marion Morgan and George B. Dowell; material suggested by Frank Mitchell; screen play and dialogue by Mae West; film editor, Stuart Heisler; art directors, Hans Dreier and Bernard Herzbrun. Cast: Mae West, Victor McLaglen, Phillip Reed, Harold Huber, Soo Yong, Lucille Webster Gleason, Helen Jerome Eddy, Tetsu Komai, James Burke, Harry Beresford, Conway Tearle. BOUT all that Mae West has contributed to the screen is tinseled vulgarity. We should be grateful to her, though, for more than any other individual is she responsible for the creation of the League of Decency which is responsible for the present satisfactory boxoffice conditions. Her latest picture, Klondike Annie, practically her own production as she wrote the story and bossed the rest of it, is not worth seeing but its career will be well worth watching. If Paramount is foolish enough to release it generally, it is going to be met with an uproar of protest by all the organizations which stand for good taste and decency in screen entertainment. In the picture, Mae West plays Frisco Doll. We see her first as the kept woman of a Chinaman whom she kills by stabbing him in the back. Fleeing from the law, she takes passage on a boat bound for Nome. Another passenger is a religious worker garbed in a uniform resembling that of the Salvation Army. She dies. The Doll changes clothes with the corpse and makes up the face of the devout woman to resemble a professional prostitute. She pokes a cigarette between the dead lips of the decent woman. Mind you, you see this being done, if your stomach’s appeal to your eyes to close themselves is not too strong to be resisted. The officers pursuing her think the corpse is the Doll, and, in her false raiment the erstwhile prostitute of the Chinaman becomes a religious worker. The whole thing reveals the functioning of a foul mind at the peak of its odor. It is a horrible picture, a revolting one, a disgrace not only to Paramount but to the entire film industry. And it bears the purity seal of the Hays organization. Dave Does Himself Proud LITTLE LORD FAUNTLEROY, United Artists release of Selznick International production. Stars Freddie Bartholomew. Directed by John Cromwell; screen play by Hugh Walpole; from play by Frances Hodgson Burnett; photographed by Charles Rosher; special effects by Jack Cosgrove and Virgil Miller; musical score, Max Steiner; art director, Sturges Carne; associate, Casey Roberts; wardrobe, Sophie Wachner; assistant directors, Eric Stacey and Robert Stillman. Supporting cast: Dolores Costello Barrymore, C. Aubrey Smith, Guy Kibbee, Henry Stephenson, Mickey Rooney, Constance Collier, E. E. Clive, Una O’Connor, Jackie Searl, Jessie Ralph, Ivan Simpson, Helen Flint, Eric Alden, May Beatty, Virginia Field, Reginald Barlow, Lionel Belmore, Tempe Pigott, Gilbert Emery, Lawrence Grant, Walter Kingsford, Eily Malyon, Fred Walton, Robert Emmett O’Connor, Elsa Buchanan. AVE SELZNICK gives us another notable picture, notDir alike for its good taste, human atmosphere, cap able direction, appropriate production and understanding acting. While I do not agree the script is the best that could be written from the book, I grant it is quite good enough to permit John Cromwell to give us a ets which should satisfy audiences throughout the world. The story of Little Lord Fauntleroy is classic hokum. It is all sentiment, its goodness dripping with virtue and its badness yielding to virtue triumphant. If the story had no classic background and had been submitted to a Hollywood producer as an original, its progress toward the screen would have come to an abrupt stop at the desk of the first reader who scanned it. But it has become a classic, so it comes to the screen and will do big business at the box-office. And why will it do big business at the box-office? Because the public knows when it views the picture it is going to get one of the biggest doses of hokum ever crammed into a feature length film. It is hokum, as we use the word in Hollywood, which made the book popular and makes its title of box-office value to picture houses. If picture producers would give the public fewer social problems, less sophisticated arguing, and more warmly human hokum of the Fauntleroy type, they would please a larger audience. It is not the title of the Burnett book in itself which will attract the public; it is the promise the title gives of a full dose of human seniment. And the book has no corner on such sentiment. It can be written into original screen stories as easily as it can be found between the covers of books. I was familiar with every turn the Fauntleroy story was going to take, yet never for a moment did my interest in it lag. I lived again the effect it produced when I read it in my youth; it stirred my emotions as it did then. I loved Dearest all over again, glowed with pleasure over Ceddie’s conquest of the old Earl, and wanted to hiss the brazen mother of the false claimant to the earldom. My only regret was Dave’s failure to show us Ceddie’s joy when he went to the stables and met his pony. I remember the pony, but was denied the pleasure of meeting him again. John Cromwell gives the sentimental story sympathetic direction, developing its sentimental qualities unblushingly but without becoming mawkish. He makes Freddie Bartholomew a regular boy, a little he-man who glories in a rough-and-tumble fight and is equally frank in parading his great love for his mother, and his friendship for the grocer, the apple woman and the bootblack. No happier choice for a leading role could have been made. It was a generous, graceful gesture Dave Selznick made in providing Dolores Costello with an opportunity to return to the screen under such auspicious circumstances. The intervening years have robbed her of none of her beauty nor have they lessened the appeal of her personality or the convincing quality of her acting. Aubrey Smith, as the Earl of Dorincourt, gives us a really remarkable characterization, a finely shaded performance which ranks as the best he has contributed to the screen. Henry Stephenson, another veteran who never disappoints, is well cast. Guy Kibbee, Mickey Rooney, Jessie Ralph, Helen Flint, Ivan Simpson, are others who stand out in the long and capable cast. The Selznick art department gives the story a setting which preserves admirably the English atmosphere, and