Hollywood Spectator (February 29, 1936)

Hollywood Spectator Page Nine be with unhuman eyebrows. Jean’s beauty is not quite emphatic enough to stand up under the handicap of obviously artificial trimmings. However, if the eyebrows do not annoy you, you will find her performance satisfactory. Myrna Loy, as usual, is outstanding. When she throws herself into the arms of her mother-in-law (May Robson) and sobs out her fear that her husband no longer loves her, I almost cried with her. No other actress on the screen outmatches her in ability to reflect completely by mood, gesture and voice, the meaning of each of her scenes. Intelligence is Myrna’s greatest asset, and her powers of expression always are at its command. It is a finely drawn characterization she has here, one with its background in monotone, as througout the picture she is merely the attractive wife of an extremely busy man, but she makes the part a vibrant, impressive one of emotional nuances which run the scale from gaiety to grief. » * * And again we have James Stewart in a performance which puts under his feet another rung in the ladder to cinematic fame which he most assuredly is destined to climb. His explanation to Jean Harlow of how he secured a raise in pay is a beautiful bit of acting. George Barbier, May Robson, Hobart Cavanaugh, Tom Dugan, Gilbert Emery, and a dozen or so more not listed in the cast have much to do toward making the picture such a satisfactory contribution to the season’s entertainment. The screen play by Norman Krasna, Alice Duer Miller and John Lee Mahin is an extremely logical bit of screen writing. It provides for a nice balancing of parts between the three stars and the showing of each in a favorable light. It is a story of a husband who loves his wife but unwittingly puts too great a strain on her loyalty, which he takes for granted. The picture makes it evident that the script was an excellent one. Review Goes Round and Round GENTLE JULIA, 20th-Fox release of Sol M. Wurtzel production. Directed by John Blystone; screen play by Lamar Trotti; based on novel by Booth Tarkington; photography by Ernest Palmer; assistant director, Jasper Blystone; art direction, Duncan Cramer, Albert Hogsett; costumes, Alberto Luza; musical direction, Samuel Kaylin. Cast: Jane Withers, Tom Brown, Marsha Hunt, Jackie Searl, Francis Ford, George Meeker, Maurice Murphy, Harry Holman, Myra Marsh, Hattie McDaniel, Jackie Hughes, Eddie Buzard. OL WuRTZEL is to be commended for giving the children something they will enjoy. I suppose that will be the keynote of all reviews of Gentle Julia. It features Jane Withers, a child, has other children in its cast and a majority of its footage is devoted to childish pranks. But commendation of it as a picture that will please children does not imply condemnation of it as one which will bore adults. As a matter of fact, a picture boring to adults will not be pleasing to children. A perfect example of a piece of screen entertainment we would say was aimed exclusively at children was Three Little Pigs. In New York Times Square one night I read that title on marquees of five different theatres, and children do not patronize Broadway houses at night. All Walt Disney’s films are really picturized nursery rhymes, yet children get no more enjoyment from them than do their parents. They have elemental appeal, and elementals are not measured in terms of years. All of us who had young children when screen entertainment was young, gained our first interest in motion pictures because of the insistent demands of the children that we should take them to film theatres. The screen provided children with the first opportunity they had to follow stories told in the elemental language of pictures which moved. Their imaginations translated the pictures into terms they could understand. As you sat by your child and viewed a silent picture, both of you did not get the same story because both imaginations did not function alike, but each got what pleased him most. That is what gave screen entertainment the initial impulse that created the great film industry. * When the screen =< talkie it banished the imagination as its main asset and presented an entirely new form of entertainment demanding the functioning of the intellect for its enjoyment. You and your child, not possessing equal intellectual development, no longer could enjoy the same picture, and the screen became a wholly adult form of entertainment except for such films as Disney and his imitators provide. The screen’s maximum potential audience must necessarily include children, but the possible maximum will be attained again only to the extent Hollywood’s product reverts to its elemental method of story telling, the pictorial method which has universal appeal. Pictures would not have lost the patronage of children if the sound camera from the first had been used only to make audible the printed titles which facilitated the telling of silent stories. Gentle Julia will appeal to children, not solely because it is mainly about children, but because it is about something children can understand. It is universal entertainment because none of us can grow too old to interpret for our own enjoyment anything children enjoy. The picture pushes back the years and gives us variations of the things we did when we were young. It is good for us to live our youth again even for the brief period of a picture’s unreeling, so Gentle Julia is a production I can recommend to you for your own enjoyment, and I positively insist you take the children with you when you go to view it. Never mind if there are lessons to be done, if you never allow the children to stay up that late; the youngsters have had lean pickings in the way of pictures since they began to talk the adult language and some consideration is due them. —— Gentle Julia belies its name. Julia herself, in the person of the sweet and appealing Marsha Hunt, is a gentle little thing, but Jane Withers, Jackie Searl and the other children are regular little devils who will delight you. It is the second time I have seen Marsha. The first time was in The Virginia Judge. 1 wrote then that she is “a little girl with a charming smile and a turned up nose,” and that we would hear from her if her naturalness were not spoiled by training in stage acting. She is a delectable morsel in Gentle Julia, as sweet and appealing as a just opened rose, and if she can resist branding by Hollywood’s rubber stamp, if she can save her eyebrows from being sacrificed to crayon hand work and her nose from the Don’t overlook reading about the SpecTaTor’s Tenth Birthday Party. Page. 2.