Hollywood Spectator (February 29, 1936)

Page Eight February 29, 1936 Louis Pasteur, who bequeathed to the world medical knowledge which will benefit mankind for the rest of time. The Pasteur picture grips you during its entire showing; you take it away with you from the theatre and live it again. As you view the Mudd picture your attention is held by the pictorial effectiveness of the scenes, the superb photography, outstanding direction and skilled performances, but in retrospect you find the production gains its impressiveness solely from its bulk and not from a sustained spiritual quality comparable with that which makes the Pasteur film outstanding, and which all pictures must possess if they are to be wholly successful. Toward the end we see Warner Baxter in bed convalescing from fever. He looks rested, healthy, his usual self. When we next see him, on the occasion of his return home, he is feeble, drawn, hollow-eyed. Apparently his pardon had a more debilitating effect upon him than his attack of fever. This closing sequence is too theatrical. Baxter strikes a dramatic pose at the gate; his faithful wife does not fly down the path and into his arms. His small daughter first advances, and finally the wife who gives us the impression she was waiting for the director’s signal. John Ford has no master in the art of making members of his cast give good performances. Warner Baxter never before reached such heights as he does in this picture, and Gloria Stuart displays histrionic ability never even hinted at before. Claude Gillingwater, as a lively old die-hard Southerner, is a tower of strength to the picture. Harry Carey is another who makes his performance outstanding among so many good ones. John Carradine, in the first big role I have seen him carry, presents an extraordinarily effective characterization. Small parts and bits are enacted by players who respond as intelligently to Ford’s direction as do those I mention. There is an evenness in the acting, a blending of characters that sets every player’s place in the general pattern the director has woven. I noticed one young man I have been spotting before, Maurice Murphy, who strikes me as being an actor who is going to get somewhere. Certainly the production is one of the most impressive to come from any studio in a long time. It is interesting, too, by virtue of its being supervised by the man who wrote the screen play. When we have perfectly made motion pictures writers will be making most of them. It was history’s fault, not Nunnally Johnson’s, that the life of Dr. Mudd supplied so little story material that he had to round it out with incidents only contemporary with it and with no direct bearing on it. The incidents were well written, well directed and well acted, which is all we can expect of them, but I hope when Darryl Zanuck again dips into history he will pick on some character whose activities on earth were more varied than those of the lamented Mudd. The Spectator is the only film paper published in Hollywood that is read and quoted by the trade and lay press in over ninety per cent of the countries in which motion pictures are made. Our cbllection of clippings shows SPECTATOR articles have been translated to date into twenty-three different languages. It’s a Habit with Clarence WIFE VERSUS SECRETARY, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Directed by Clarence Brown; screen play by Norman Krasna, Alice Duer Miller, John Lee Mahin; produced by Hunt Stromberg; musical score by Herbert Stothart and Edward Ward; recording director, Douglas Shearer; art director, Cedric Gibbons; associates, William A. Horning, Edwin B. Willis; wardrobe by Dolly Tree; photographed by Ray June, ASC; film editor, Frank E. Hull; assistant director, Charles Dorian. Cast: Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Myrna Loy, May Robson, George Barbier, James Stewart, Hobart Cavanaugh, Tom Dugan, Gilbert Emery. LARENCE Brown was fortunate in having such a C strong cast for this picture, but the picture itself was even more fortunate in having Clarence for its director. It is a director’s picture. The triangle theme has been worn thin as story material for the screen; there is Not a gripping scene, not a tense moment in the picture; neither the story nor the film stresses a point to arrest the attention of the audience, yet Wife Versus Secretary is one of the most completely satisfying pictures one could wish for, an achievement vastly’to the credit of its director. And it is another success to the credit of its producer, Hunt Stromberg, who seems to have contracted a habit of turning out notable examples of screen entertainment. I have written often that it is the medium which entertains, that the screen gets its strength more from its method of telling a story than from the story itself. Here we have an uneventful recital of incidents in the lives of three quite ordinary people, woven into a fascinating piece of entertainment by the intelligent realization of the graphic powers of the motion picture camera. The little things in the lives of the characters are made big things to the audience by the method of their presentation. With all the rhythm of a lilting piece of music the picture glides before our eyes, utilizing the ability of the players to make natural and convincing its human elements, the skill of technicians to give it sympathetic pictorial appeal, and the artistic taste of its costume designer to make its women look attractive. ee Certainly no picture ever had a series of smarter looking sets. Cedric Gibbons and his associates outdid themselves in presenting the camera with an opportunity to record last minute effects in modern interiors and the best of taste in their furnishing. Ray June’s photography realized all their pictorial possibilities, presenting us with a succession of beautiful pictures which provide a smart background in sympathy with the smart mood of the story. A refreshing variation of the triangle theme is the fact that the viewpoint of each of the parties to it is reasonable. All three have our sympathy. It is Jean Harlow, the secretary, who heals the breach between Myrna Loy and Clark Gable, the wife and husband. The secretary loves the husband, but she knows the husband and wife love one another, and wittingly does nothing to make either unhappy. That makes it a nice story. Clark Gable’s hold on his public will lose none of its strength by virtue of the performance he contributes to this picture. It is a part of varying moods, one of considerable emotional sweep, gay, grave, dynamic, and in each of its phases Clark is at the peak of his form. I have always liked him on the screen, but never quite so completely as this time. Jean Harlow, whose habit of wearing crayon crescents for eyebrows annoys me excessively, makes the secretary both human and efficient, that is, as human as one can