World Film and Television Progress (1937-1938)

{Night Must Full — continued) His study is one of brilliant subtleties. With apparent ease he thrills and fascinates, suggesting the horror of a warped mind even in his most charming moments. Emlyn Williams succeeded in getting into the mind of a type of murderer when he conceived the character of Danny; Montgomery shows you that mind with all its cunning, its simplicities and its egotistical imaginings. —Richard Haestier, The Star Critical Summary. Robert Montgomery's determination to forsake the inevitable playboy parts for a chance to act seems to have been altogether justified. His playing of Danny was very well received on both sides of the Atlantic. The casting of Miss Rosalind Russell did not receive so unanimous a vote. Parnell (John M. Stahl — Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.) Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, Edna May Oliver, Edmund Gwenn. Parnell is dull. It omits entirely the background of evictions, dynamitings, murders from ambush and all the fierce prejudice that formed the background of the era. Without that, ParnelTs story loses its meaning. The result is a mixture of Uncle Tom, Dostoievsky and a high school tableau with a touch of Biblical allegory. Clark Gable and Myrna Loy are miscast. At moments they even look rather foolish. Gable, as Parnell, is incredible. Seated in the House of Commons, as leader of the Irish Party, he is a nineteenthcentury collar "ad," making history and chasing Myrna Loy in a Committee Room. Nobody in America will care that.Pigott, the blackmailer, who fled to Spain and actually committed suicide, is here made to shoot himself outside the English court room. Nobody will care that the eight or nine-year affair between Mrs. O'Shea and Parnell is condensed to a matter of months, or that numerous other liberties have been taken. In England and in Ireland, however, they may care. — Variety Trudging as I do to the movies year in and year out, I seem always capable of amazement at the amount of boredom they can arouse. Especially do I feel so in a case of this sort, where money has been spent to give the whole thing a rich setting, where persons of recognised talent have been employed in the making, where expert performers have been engaged for prominent roles, and where history provides the kernel for drama and romance to a superlative degree. Perhaps, after all, the film is but a rebuke to idle pleasure-seekers. As such it is highly successful. In the first place, probably history provided a too heady situation for our discreet era. The affair of Mr. Parnell and the highly stimulating Mrs. Katie O'Shea presents problems that no nice movie functionary can pretend to understand. I must say that the two leading players, expert though they may be in their way, give not the slightest indication of trying to understand anything. Mr. Gable wears sideburns for the occasion and relies upon that adornment for the extra subtleties requisite to the stormy political career of Parnell. Miss Loy dons a bonnet and sheds a tear now and again. I should add that the romance, as presented on the screen, is persistently chaperoned, with affable humour, by the aunt, played by Edna May Oliver in her genteel mood. — John Mosher, The New Yorker "They Gave Him a Gun" 26 The Woman Between (Anatole Litvak — Radio.) Paul Muni, Miriam Hopkins, Louis Hayward, Colin Clive. The Woman Between won't mean anything to art or commerce. It's just another tear-jerker, punctuated with bullets. Not that it's bad exactly. Muni's performance as the French airman, bearded and a trifle gauche, sensitive to his unpopularity, regarded by his comrades as a jinx because two of his observers have been killed, is a strong and convincing bit of work, at times really moving. Where The Woman Between falls down is in its detail. You have seen all the people, except possibly the bearded airman, a dozen times before; the humour is standardised Mack Sennett. Louis Hayward is tense and taut in the Noel Coward manner, and Miriam Hopkins, though by no means without talent, is unmistakably from that part of Gaul which lies south of the Mason and Dixon line. —George Campbell, The Bystander The Woman Between is an emotional story of a French air pilot and his observer in the Great War, the woman being the wife of the one and the mistress of the other. Since this load of passion is too much for any one cinema airplane to carry, the lover is eventually shot down in the cockpit, leaving the future clear for technical felicity. The film is from a French novel, UEquipage, and is presented with frank American sentiment by a Russian director out of England and Austria. All the actors perform industriously, and cry a good deal at odd moments, for which you can hardly blame them. The sound effects men, though, and the composers of background music appear to enjoy themselves hugely, and the stunt fliers have a really grand time. — C. A. Lejeune, The Observer ■^r They Gave Him a Gun (W. S. Van Dyke — Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.) Spencer Tracy, Franchot Tone, Gladys George. The time to make a noise about it will be when Spencer Tracy gives a bad performance. All that need be said now is that here he gives another admirable one. So does Franchot Tone in a part well away from his usual polished impudence. This time he is the subject of as extraordinary a sermon as Hollywood has ever preached. The text is that the U.S. Government, having taught its young men to use guns for 1917, automatically trained them to come back home and be gangsters. A logical projection of that thought surely is that Britain ought to be three years ahead of its gangster era. The acting is better than the story, and the story a mile ahead of its moral. The best moment is Tracy, his eyes closed in calm reverie and a gun in his face, telling Tone what he thinks of him. Miss George I don't think is a film bet. You can take me up on that if I'm wrong. — Stephen Watts, The Sunday Express They Gave Him a Gun is a vaguely intense Hollywood picture, half-war film and half gangster-film, with lots of background music, a blonde nurse, and a moral. The hero is a reluctant soldier who wins the Croix du Guerre for sniping Germans in 1916, and who comes home and starts sniping Americans in 1918. By 1936 he is a sniper