World Film and Television Progress (1938)

Love, in the cinema, has taken a new turn. No longer does the tender passion find expression in soulful glances, whispered vows or burning clinches. Instead, the hero and heroine trade volleys of uppercuts as tokens of their mutual affection, mowing each other down with passionate haymakers. Historians of the cinema proclaim that this battle of the sexes began when James Cagney gallantly dunked Mae Clarke's nose in a grapefruit in The Public Enemy of six years ago. Mae's instance was the most spectacular. Many other gangster molls were roughly treated in that extensive series of films extending from Beast of the City and Smart Money to Marked Women and Kid Galahad. The girls in these "unhand me, you brute" films were never actually knocked slap-happy. They were merely handled like a coin being flipped about by a saturnine henchman with the jitters. In short, they were not treated according to the dictates of Emily Post. To-day, the gangster film, even in its G Man metamorphosis, is largely moribund. It has been succeeded by the sophisticated, slapstick comedy, popularly supposed to have been born (or re-born) with My Man Godfrey, the Gregory la Cava production in which Carole Lombard and William Powell executed some inspired horse-play. My Man Godfrey is credited with having initiated the current, pixilated cinema trend. ANYTHING <«* Wm. £■ In these films, the heroine, being unconventional, daring, independent, etc., found herself in ticklish situations from which she found it impossible to extricate herself with the usual, catty drawing-room innuendoes. In this cinematic man's world, where no holds are barred, the little ladies were forced to have recourse to their wits and their punches as well. Outstanding instances of this feminine emancipation were Jean Arthur, Claudette Colbert and Myrna Loy in such items as Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, It Happened One Night and The Thin Man. The girls in these films slept in haystacks, uncovered corpses in their bedroom closets, dashed around the country on buses, and their unprecedented antics ultimately led up to the full-fledged hit-andrun motion pictures. Examine the evidence. In True Confession, the same Miss Lombard who was one of the zanies in Twentieth Century and My Man Godfrey, was lovingly bounced about by Fred MacMurray, immersed in an Adirondack lake and confronted with the facial apoplectics of John Barrymore. In Nothing Sacred she met with further punishment, dishing it out as well. She exchanged uppercuts with Fredric March, jumped in and out of the East River at night and took New York City for a collective ride, suffering all the while from alleged radium poisoning. William (Wild Bill) Wellman, who directed Nothing Sacred (and Public Enemy also) is noted as one of Hollywood's foremost purveyors of this type of uninhibited business. In fact, Wellman's per but LOVE BABY Black eyes replace purple passion in present-day movies formance on the motion picture set is described as surpassing that of his stars and equalling that of the supreme master, Ernst Lubitsch. Thus far, matters were moderately comprehensible. Carole, as a former Sennett bathing beauty, could properly sock and be socked, jump into bodies of water and smear the town a bright red. But further developments in this genre were astounding, to say the least. Joan Blondell was next to succumb. In both Back in Circulation and There's Always a Woman, she ripped into and through her roles like the three Ritz Brothers. In the last-named film, Miss Blondell was given a third-degree by a tough police squad throughout the night. The morning found Joan pert and smiling, while the muscle-bound bulldogs of the law were half asleep after their unprecedented exertion. In Love, Honor and Behave, pretty Priscilla Lane squared off in a slugfest with Wayne Morris, who is more than six feet tall. Morris, who proved his pugilistic talents in Kid Galahad and The Kid Comes Back, almost lost this encounter, but was just saved by the fade-out at the end of the eighth reel. The staid and stately Irene Dunne, heroine of such tear-jerkers as Symphony of Six Million and such quasi-epics as Cimarron, went the way of all actresses by becoming brash and pixilated in The Awful Truth, one of the better films of last year, directed by the same Leo~McCarey who gave us Make Way for To-morrow. Miss Dunne, who had passed her preliminary test with Theodora Goes Wild, proved here that she could play slapstick with the best of them. But the great surprise to date came when Katharine ^Hepburn— The Miss Hepburntook the plunge in Bringing Up Baby. Letting her hair down, Miss Hepburn became involved, consecutively, with such phenomena as psychiatrists, paleontologists, leopards and one of the most lengthy series of slapstick falls since Mabel Normand and Fatty Arbuckle were in their prime. All with remarkable success. The surrender of Miss Hepburn presages the complete capitulation of the tragediennes of Lower California. The crystal ball of the future reveals visions of Garbo, Dietrich and Temple tangling with impossible people in even more impossible situations, all fomented in the wildest vapourings of desperate scriptwriters, and all dedicated to the belly-laugh. Out of little Keystones does 1938's box-office come. Ezra Goodman 103