World Film and Television Progress (1937-1938)

The Show Goes On (Basil Dean— A.T.P.). Grade Fields, Owen Nares, John Stuart. Perhaps, after all, Gracie Fields is such a supreme artist in her own right that the merit or demerit of her films is a trifling matter. Anyway, it is nice to think so. Here she is a Lancashire mill-hand who leaps to fame from the local pantomime chorus. A composer teaches her concert singing, which is a flop until she burlesques his songs, which wounds him deeply. He sails away and dies, but she makes good at Drury Lane, and there is a boy friend from the home town. Grade's numbers are good, and she is now astonishingly groomed. She sings to a troopship from the Queen Mary and leads a spectacular finale with great spirit. Homely domestic humour abounds, and Horace Hodges, John Stuart, Arthur Sinclair, Edward Rigby, and Amy Veness are well cast. Billy Merson had a brief role. I was sorry for Owen Nares, who, in a Vandyke beard, plays with gentle persuasiveness a composer of tunes which are unspeakably banal. There are some quite bad minor performances, and I wonder who will find the story convincing. But the whole thing has a slapdash breeziness of its own. — P. L. Mannock, The Daily Herald Gracie Fields pays a sentimental farewell to home-made movies and demonstrates once again how immeasurably superior as an artist she is to any film material she has yet been given. Gracie is the mill-girl who makes good all over again here, but this time it is less of a frolic and more of a real life story. Parts of it are based on incidents in Grade's own life. Apart from Gracie's unashamed sincerity, which gets away with dramatic murder, there are little things which give moments of a hackneyed story a sudden ring of truth. Gracie, with dark brown "wireless rings," a curl again, a wind-swept pierrot concert party at Colwyn Bay, the interminable train journeys of a third-rate music-hall "King Solomon's Mines" 28 tour. Moral seems to be that what seems easy at the Palladium to-day had a tough break getting by at the Rochdale Empire in 1926, even with Professor Augustino's sea-lions topping the bill. The Queen Mary just beats Owen Nares for second starring honours. — Guy Morgan, The Daily Express Critical Summary. Mr. Basil Dean and the English studios seem as far away as ever from solving the problem of Miss Gracie Fields. Here is the greatest moneymaking artiste of the screen, and no one is able to decide what to do with her. It seems impossible for them to transfer that exuberant personality to the screen in a story worthy of her undeniably great talent. On the Avenue (Roy del Ruth— 20th Century-Fox.) Dick Powell, Alice Faye, Madeleine Carroll. The Avenue is Park Avenue, which is the Millionaires' Row of New York, and the story tells us how "the richest girl in the world" resents a parody of her home life in an impertinent revue. To get her revenge, the girl buys the revue, but love and doughnuts at a coffee stall lead to a fairly happy ending. Dick Powell gets better and better. He sings attractive Irving Berlin songs with tremendous success. But Dick is dissatisfied. He wants to play in a film in which he will not have to sing. He would like to play the sort of light comedy hero from whom Robert Montgomery is trying to escape. Anyhow, whether he succeeds in his ambition or not, On the Avenue is high-grade entertainment, with Dick at his best, with Alice Faye more likeable than in almost any of her previous films, and with Madeleine Carroll carrying off in style the part of the rich girl who runs away, at the well-known last minute, from a wedding with a bumptious explorer. — Seton Margrave, The Daily Mail On the Avenue is Chateau Hollywood '37. Irving Berlin has written four or five songs, Dick Powell, Alice Faye and Madeleine Carroll provide romance, and the three Ritz brothers are still trying harder than the Marx brothers, without much luck. — Campbell Dixon, The Daily Telegraph Talking Feet (John Baxter— U.K. Films.) Hazel Ascot, Jack Barty. If there is anyone now active in British film production who can put the authentic hall-mark of British character into a film, it seems to me that it is John Baxter. Not that Talking Feet is a great film in the sense some of us like to retain for "great" in a sphere notorious for its abuse of superlatives. But it is a good film: and I have seen none better for its alert and instinctive seizure of just those essentials in dialogue, stars, and minor types as well as in acting, which may be held to exemplify what, in screen art, is peculiarly and exclusively British. This is a comedy with an East End of London setting, and when Mr. Baxter has the camera pause briefly before a good, plain, eloquent Cockney face, we feel that it is such a face that all may understand, and here for a thrilling moment the British mood is fully revealed. It is the same with the market scenes. This could have developed into an excellent documentary of the East End of London. The shots are excellent in their lifelikeness. There is a rich, ripe sense of character, a relish for mordant wit, a salty tang in the atmosphere that the film engenders, and an honest homeliness in it all. British film production need not fear Hollywood, nor lean upon Quotas or any other form of protection, if it can turn out any more successes like Talking Feet, even though it does make too many concessions to an old form of entertainment. — The Birmingham Mail Slave Ship (Tay Garnett — 20th Century-Fox.) Warner Baxter, Wallace Beery, Elizabeth Allen, Mickey Rooney. Slave Ship harbors a crew of hardy fellows who make their living transporting blacks from the African coast to an illegitimate market on this side. Wallace Beery is the meanest, Mickey Rooney is the funniest, and Warner Baxter changes over about midway from callous to noble. His change is in character, however, for he meets Elizabeth Allen, and that is where the plot starts. All their goings-on are planted against the bloody career of a bad ship. Tay Garnett, who directed China Seas with such gusto, has shrewdly emphasised this phase of the story, and has given the Albatross a character so sturdy that the events aboard ship have a lot more meaning than they might otherwise have had. He has made a true spectacle of the slave scenes in the hold of the vessel, and the escape sequences when the ship nears St. Helena. This is by no means a Mutiny on the Bounty or a Captains Courageous. There is a certain superficial and unspectacular quality about most of it that throws the big scenes out of proportion. The characters are given little grooves to play in, and don't ever become people at all. — Katherine Best, Stage In a word, it is a colorful tale of the sea, with some breath-taking marine shots and a narrative that may tax your credulity but never your eyes. We wish though, that Mr. Zanuck's men would give up playing "Rule Britannia" every time the English are mentioned; it's getting to be almost as pat as an Amos and Andy theme song. — Frank S. Nugent, The New York Times Michael Strogoff (George Nicholls— RKO Radio.) Anton Walbrook, Akim Tamiroff. Elizabeth Allen, Margot Grahame, Fay Bainter. The Russian business is an old story now and has, I believe, been filmed several times. It originated from the pen of Jules Verne, a demoded writer who had two qualities which are now as rare as the bittern in ornithology or as the scent