Hollywood Spectator (1931)

November, 1931 15 one on earth could have made a wholly acceptable picture from the material which was handed to him. ▼ ▼ The MOST stupid thing about Reckless Living is the fact that it was made. Talkies so far above it in merit that they can not be compared, are flopping all over the country. Good stories told in clever dialogue are not returning their production cost, and here we have a dull story told in poor dialogue. It is too bad that Junior made it. I think he should place it gently on a shelf and charge it off to the maintenance of his reputation as an intelligent producer. So Unnecessary ^'jpHE FIRST thing you will notice in Twenty-Four Hours J is the frankness with which Kay Francis and Clive Brook discuss their marital misunderstandings. We discover them in a drawing room where the after-dinner liqueur is being served to the guests. Kay and Clive are married ; they sit six or eight feet from one another, and discuss the most intimate details of their life together. It is all right for a husband and wife to try to patch up differences in a neutral drawing room in which they are guests, but generally it is done in tones that do not fill the whole room. In this picture no effort whatever is made to sugMarion Gering gest that there is anything intimate in the discussion. The two are picked out in a close shot; there is no hum of voices as the other guests carry on conversations, and we listen to Kay confess an indiscretion and Brook speculate on his chances of getting very drunk. And because we can not see the other guests when the camera moves up to the two, we are supposed to consider that they suddenly have died or have become deaf. It is picture-making at the crudest manifestation of its mental ineptitude. ^ ▼ PERHAPS IF THIS assault upon my intelligence had not come in the opening sequence, I would not have viewed all of Twenty-Four Hours quite so critically. Any picture, of course, must be considered good until it does something itself to prove that it is otherwise. It is seldom that this indiscretion is committed in the opening seqence. It, however, only anticipates the decision we are going to reach later. This Paramount offering, directed by Marion Gering and featuring Clive Brook, Kay Francis, Regis Toomey and Miriam Hopkins, is a drab and weirdly written social drama that will please no one. Toomey chokes his wife to death while Brook, whose mistress the wife has become, lies drunk in an adjoining room. That is the kind of ugly and depressing entertainment Paramount is offering in these depressing days. I am not sure what the story is about, an uncertainty which apparently I share with Louis Weitzenkorn, who wrote the screen play. I thought it had to do with the married life of Kay and Clive, but my doubts came when I viewed the elaborate manner in which the shooting of Toomey was staged. Only the fact that the story was about him would justify the footage devoted to his demise, but I could not see what con nection the shooting had with anything else. The whole picture impresses one as being so unnecessary. I must admit, however, that it is one of the most efficiently produced and best acted pictures that Paramount has turned out lately. Cummings and Baxter WHEN YOU SET out to view a picture directed by Irving Cummings you can feel pretty sure that you are going to enjoy some gorgeous photographic treats. It is strange to me that more producers and directors do not grasp the commercial value of the esthetic pictorial quality that can be made a part of a film creation. Of course, very few directors and still fewer producers have any sense of composition or photography, but many cameramen have, and the box-office would be the gamer if they were allowed to exercise it. The Cisco Kid, a Fox picture directed by Cummings, opens with some of the most glorious shots ever screened, sensitive etchings of the moods of the desert done with superb artistry by the camera of Barney McGill. That they have box-office value was evidenced by the audible gasps of appreciation that came from the audience. The picture brings back to us Warner Baxter in the role in which he so brilliantly burst upon us when we first dis JEAN HERSHOLT • • • extends greetings to the MONTHLY SPECTATOR Irving Cummings