National Board of Review Magazine (Jan 1936 - Dec 1938)

10 National Board of Review Magazine work, and — following in father's footsteps — goes to the local boss for a job as "leader". There he finds his father being sent out to buy a cigar, grateful for the privilege of even that menial connection with the district big-man. He finds his father is just a stooge, all his pride in him is smashed, he wants to get away. He tries to enlist in the navy, but he is still a few months too young for that. Then he happens to attract the attention of a gambler who is "taking over" the district — a somewhat flashy young man whose good clothes, swell apartment, plenty of money in pocket, and most of all whose careful flattery of Chuck win the boy's admiration and loyalty. A young gangster is in the hatching stage. A shooting affair, which happens logically enough, sets him right, and at the end he has enlisted in the navy — no ideal solution for the problem, perhaps, but a natural thing for Chuck to have done and for his folks and friends to have approved of. Chuck and his family, the other boys, the cops and judges and saloonkeepers and even the gangsters, are all honestly depicted, with an atmosphere of environment in setting that is splendidly realistic. The element of social betterment, represented by a slum doctor and a rich girl who inherits and tries to improve the tenements, is not so fortunate, partly because they are not acted prepossessingly and partly because they constantly excite the suspicion that they are going to burst out into a spurious and hackneyed movie-romance. There is also a bit too much of the Mother Machree brand of Irish sentimentality — true enough to the natures of these people but managed in a trite and over-saccharine fashion. But only to people too fastidiously sensitive to minor flaws will these things dim the essential sincerity and power of the main story, which really gains instead of being hurt by the lack of the slick polish that has become such an over-rated standard for movies. And no one can miss the fact that Jackie Cooper, always one of the best child actors, has grown in something more than height and muscle. For any producer who will trouble to find the right parts for him he can go on being a swell actor indefinitely. J. S. H. The Life and Loves of Beethoven Written and directed by Abel Ounce, with dialogue by Steve Passeur, photographed by Robert LeFebre and Marc Fossard, settings by Jacques Colombier, edited by Marguerite Beague. Music by Orchestre de la Societe des Concerts du Conservatoire de Paris under the direction of Louis Masson. Produced by Abel Gance for Generales Productions, distributed by World Pictures Corporation. The cast Ludwig van Beethoven Harry Baur Therese von Brunswick Annie Ducaux Juliette Guicciardi Jany Holt Schuppanzigh Pauley Count Gallenberg Debucourt Count Guicciardi Lucien Rozemberg Countess Guicciardi Yoland Lafon Zmeskall Lucas Gridoux ABEL GANCE couldn't be called an old man, but in the history of movies he seems like an old timer. Harry Alan Potamkin used to call him the French D. W. Griffith, and while it is dangerous to call anybody the French or German or Russian Anybody-but-himself , there are a lot of things in Gance, to this day, that suggest our own Old Master. One obvious resemblance is a fondness for sweet closeups of pretty girls, all misty at the edges and pastel-toned, inserted like an elaborate bit of embroidery upon a general surface where they seem — now — unnatural and affected. The same sort of over-sweetness often gets into the spirit with which he handles situations and emotions, and there are Griffith-like resorts to humor that seem to have come straight from old-fashioned vaudeville. But essentially Gance is individual, with a style of his own, and a director who still experiments with his movie-making tools, as he has always done. J'Accuse remains in memory as one of the notable French films of the silent days, and Napoleon was conceived and partly executed on as grand a scale as any picture ever made. With its three screens and its dependence on a special orchestral and vocal accompaniment, it never got an adequate showing outside the Opera in Paris. The brutally shortened version that was shown here left out all the striking originality of its technique. In this new film Gance has tackled one