Hollywood Spectator (1931)

IS Hollywood Spectator laughs through its running; there were moments when the whole body of twenty or thirty people there hung with suspense, or what looked like suspense, on the evei*y word of the hero and heroine; and there were even moments when it might have looked as if they really were enjoying themselves. And what reason do I have, say you, to suppose that they weren’t? Well, perhaps the few who were there didn’t sufficiently impress me so; perhaps because there probably were fewer and fewer there as the week went on; but largely because I can’t conceive of an audience of ordinary human beings so far forgetting that they are supposed to be able to think as to like it. The direction, by Clarence Badger, follows conventional lines so closely that I should have been hard put to it, had there been no title, to tell it from the direction of at least fifteen other directors I can name. The adaptation and dialogue are by Charles Kenyon. ▼ TV Horsey WEEPSTAKES. When Eddie Quillan whoop-te-doos his horse across the finish line in the first reel of this picture, the audience laughs quite heartily. As far as my memory serves me, that is just about the last time it laughed at Eddie. The rest of the time it was only convulsed by the hardboiled humor of Sleepy Jones, as portrayed by the king of all Sleepy Joneses, James Gleason. Lew Lipton’s story, to begin with, was not of the best. It begins in the true Alger style with the poor jockey accused of something he didn’t do, and all because of a girl, then has him wander, footsore and alone, from race track to race track, always being recognized, always losing his job when he is, always footpadding on to another track. The final landing at the track of our old Aunt Juana just over the border, is original only because it is one of the first of several hundred pictures which will use this locale now that the trek to Augua Caliente has become a week-end habit for Hollywoodites. The good old horse the jockey had ridden in his best days wins the sweepstakes, the girl and the whole shebang when Jockey Quillan finally is convinced that he ought to ride just this once again. As a poor repoi-ter who has been subjected to it several hundred times, I thought we might have been spared that final tag of the baby on the rocking horse learning from his now (again) famous father how to say whoop-te-doo in a horse’s ear in a manner to make it run circles around all the other horses in pictures. Momentary glimpses of Lew Cody, King Baggot and Paul Hurst were hardly gratifying to one who has seen these old troupers used to such good advantage in better pictures. ▼ ▼ V Dialogue EN CALL IT LOVE. Edgar Selwyn has directed this Vincent Lawrence play, Among the Married, with decided facility and cleverness, but it remains in its movie version, what it was in the original, a light and ordinary treatment of the modern marriage scene. Selwyn, however, was helped over some of the rougher spots by exceedingly good trouping on the part of Leila Hyams, Adolphe Menjou, Norman Foster and Mary Duncan. I haven’t had much chance to observe this Foster before. I saw him briefly in one of the early Monta Bell pictures made in Long Island, Young Man of Manhattan, and again in Up Pops the Devil; but he only began seriously to engage my attention in Men Call It Love. He is so convincing as Jack, the young husband, that I completely lost myself in observing him. Leila Hyams, as always, was excellent. Menjou’s role, of course, was of a stereotyped nature. The studios generally haven’t come to observe that work of his in Front Page sufficiently closely to realize how well he lends himself to more virile roles. ▼ ▼ I particularly call the attention of anyone who sees this or intends seeing it to the dialogue continuity written into it by Doris Anderson. It is by long odds one of the cleverest and most outstanding bits of dialogue adaptation that I have yet come upon in my career of viewing pictures. It is almost the first dialogue I have noticed, for one thing, which leaves the implication of the sentence to the auditor. It sparkles with bright sayings, and I had an opportunity again and again to have the meat of the sentence left to my own imaginings. The silent picture did this with its silence. I had thought it almost impossible to achieve with dialogue. But Miss Lloyd, I hasten to say, has made me change my mind. If there was anything else I remember about this sophisticated little offering, it is perhaps that audiences out in rural America are hardly primed for it. I can see that the stage presentation in New York must have moved Mr. Selwyn to believing that it is a good thing to make into a picture. I do not see that that alone is sufficient reason for so making it. In my own work, I grow so accustomed to the bad influence of sophisticated pictures that I do not notice that aspect of it much. Occasionally, however, I talk with people who don’t see as many pictures as I do, and they often have quite a different slant on the matter. ▼ T T Terrible WOMEN OF ALL NATIONS. I am beginning to think that one of the institutions badly needed in conjunction with the peace-preserving policies of the Academy is a nut house for people who make pictures like this one. I can not conceive of a studio in its right mind either making or releasing a picture of the sort. There seems to be no one spot in its whole running that you can put your finger on as having any excuse for its existence. From beginning to end it is a trashy, vulgar, cheap, lascivious business, and I hope the civil authorities who have had censorship in their minds these past few years will happen on it and use it as a first experiment for the knife. This is the work of the studio, incidentally, which more or less rebels at the jurisdiction of the Hays office — I have heard so from any number of its executives. I claim no particular love for the methods of the Hays office, but at least it does make an attempt at advising drastic cuts to pictures like this one before they are made, and the best advice I can think to give the Fox lot at the present time is to get in touch with that same office and go into a huddle with them before they make another Woynen of All Nations. ▼ ▼ The argument will be brought against me, I know, that I said much the same thing about Cock-Eyed World, which went out and did a landslide business for the studio. It is true that both these things happened. But I should like to advise any Fox executive who wishes to use this as an argument against me to go out and question the first twenty people he meets on the streets about their memory of CockEyed World. I haven’t asked twenty, but I have asked quite a few, and all of them were emphatic in declaring that it did more to antagonize them against the present regime in talking pictures than almost any other picture they could remember. The Fox credits read “A comedy drama with the characters Flagg and Quirt, originally created by Laurence Stallings