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for September 1932 6 1
Best Pictures
' ffSEALOF!
Screenlands Critic Gives Original Slants on This Month's Outstanding Screenplays
Lee Tracy plays a columnist in "Blessed Event," with Mary Brian opposite. It's good fun.
Blessed Event
W arners
"O-kay, Hollywood!" You did a good job with this one. The rapid-fire film is better than the Broadway play. It's an always amusing and occasionally dramatic celluloid presentation of the life of our modern Samuel Peeps — now don't all shout "Walter Winchell" at once. Lee Tracy plays the ace columnist and gives you an insight into the methods used by the Manhattan keyhole artists to gather their daily gossip. There is his hilarious feud with a crooner; his defiance of gangland's Big Shot; and his punch line which leads to tragedy. "Blessed Event" is a field day for Tracy, with Mary Brian doing nicely as the heroine. Don't miss the crooning Dick Powell from radio; you'll see and hear more of him, and it will be all right with you. He's a Buddy Rogers with a sense of humor. This is the best of the cycle of newspaper-columnist movies. Tracy is a great screen bet.
Constance Bennett's best picture is "What Price Hollywood?" in which Lowell Sherman also scores.
What Price Holly wood :
RKO
/^sSsjJv You'll enjoy every foot of this film. It presents a brand^EsMjfflj new Constance Bennett — sparkling, charming, no swank, no broadA — just very real and very appealing. Connie " completely wins you as the Brown Derby waitress with movie ambitions, who kids a famous director into giving her a chance. She makes good, gets married to a rich man, has a baby, is divorced, becomes involved in a juicy scandal, is forced to retire — and then wins back her domestic happiness, with a new career just around the corner. It might be the story of any one of a dozen screen stars that Adela Rogers St. Johns has written. It's brilliantly directed and acted with fascinating "inside" glimpses of the real Hollywood. Lowell Sherman, as the genially drunken director whom his little "find" tries to save, gives the finest man's performance of the month.
Ten Best Portrayals of the Month:
Lee Tracy in "Blessed Event" Guy Kibbee in "The Dark Horse" Ralph Morgan in "Strange Interlude" Norma Shearer in "Strange Interlude" Warren William in "The Dark Horse" Jean Harlow in "Red-Headed Woman" Laurence Olivier in "Westward Passage" Edmund Lowe in "Attorney for the Defense" Lowell Sherman in "What Price Hollywood?" Constance Bennett in "What Price Hollywood?"
"The Doomed Battalion" is that "different" picture some of you have been looking for. See it.
The Doomed Battalion
Universal
A good many of you have written to me moaning that there's nothing "new and different" on the screen. Just for you here is a picture that is new, and refreshingly different. It's as clean and impressive as the snows in the Tyrolean Alps where the story is laid. Nothing like it has ever been seen on the screen before. For pictorial beauty it is the film of the month, and in drama, too, it is outstanding. An Austrian battalion in the World War must hold their strategic position on a mountain-top even though the Italians are about to blow up their stronghold. A scout undertakes to skii to the village below where the enemy is quartered to discover the exact time of the explosion — the battalion's only hope. Here is drama — no Hollywood heroics, but real suspense. The vigorous Luis Trenker, the lovely and capable Tala Birell, and Victor Varconi are three of a splendid cast. See this.