Screenland (May-Oct 1931)

for August 19 3 1 husband announces that she is pure white and that the child is by a negro farm-hand — all of which is a lie. The husband shoots both wife and babe dead off stage, as she had planned. Only the doctor knows the truth — ■ that Nature is the villain. Mrs. Learner was a "brass ankle," a part-negro that can pass for a white anywhere. Mr. Heyward's play is simple and logical in its construction. Alice Brady did very well in a part that did not always fit her. But she still remains our leading emotional actress. Ben Smith as the tortured and torn husband gave a superb performance. Lester Lonergan as the doctor was fine. This is a play of pathos, irony and pity. Had I the giving, I'd have given it the Pulitzer Prize. "Old Man Murphy" Arthur Sinclair is the finest all-around actor that the Mother of Cops, whose capital is Dublin, has ever sent us. There is a vitality, an inherent comic-sentimentaldramatic kernel to his work that comes out sometimes subtly and sometimes blastingly in all he does. He is, however, best in comedy, and in this play, "Old Man Murphy," which Pat Kearney has built for him and Maire O'Neill especially, Sinclair simply keeps the house in an uproar, whether he opens his mouth or not, for his dress, his walk, his face, his lightest gesture are instinct with the grotesque, the original, the absurd. The play is tissue. It is laid in a Mid-W estern city where the Murfrecs (born Murphy from the Patch) lord it over the town. Charles Murfrcc is running for Mayor. In blows grandfather Murphy out of Ireland, and the fun begins. W hat he does to the fake Murfrces, the town, the Patch and the whiskey, is none of your business if you haven't seen it. Maire O'Neill does splendid funny work as a widow over in the Patch. "Private Lives," the Noel Coward comedy which will soon be seen in its screen version, has Madge Kennedy and Otto Kruger as the leading actors in the play. 65 "Brass Ankle," according to Mr. De Casseres, comes very near being one of the few great American plays. Alice Brady, one of our leading emotional actresses, is in the principal role of this powerful but sordid drama. Want to blow up with belly-laughter? See "Old Man Murphy." I'd like to see this expanded to picturedimensions with Sinclair and O'Neill in it, of course. "Private Lives" Gorgeous. Gay. Sparkling. Winey. Biting. Keen. Scintillant. Rollicking. Wise; Catty. A laughquake. That, ladies and gentlemen of the screen audience of America, is my spontaneous description of "Private Lives," an "intimate comedy," written by the Pooh-Bah of the Seven Arts, Noel Coward. It is a story of the psychical, physical and vocal insand-outs of the thing called Love in two beings who have been divorced, meet again, run away together, leaving their wife and husband to fiddle-faddle after them. Finally, after wrecking an apartment in Paris during a love-battle, they make a getaway while the other couple in pursuit have started a fist-fight of their own. Otto Kruger and Madge Kennedy were top-notch as the handlers of the brilliant dialogue and the swift verbal punches. They are real men and women, not Shaw epigram-dummies. Marriage unmasked is a little masterpiece, with some subtle side-swipes at Life. A great picture for Brain Alley in Hollywood. "Her Supporting Cast" Eleanor Curtis had a grand old Louis the Dumpteenth hideaway apartment somewhere in the Furtive Fifties, I should say. Eleanor was about as shrewd a chiseller, gold-digger and sugar-daddy frisker as you ever met. And in the hands of Mildred McCoy she certainly toyed with the strings of the brass-fiddle which I call my libido. Well, Eleanor makes a comic sucker of three different kinds of saps : an artist who is a romantic Rudy, a champion heavyweight w-ho cracks her bones even when he looks at her, and a wall-street coupon cormorant who sneezes into the sawdust for the bills. She strings 'em along, each one believing he's the Only Guy, when — of course ! — they all meet one another in a little trap Eleanor has laid for (Continued on page 127)