The screen

PARE LORENTZ

■ SIN, OLD STYLE. With a very few exceptions, the new. emboldened Hollywood

attitude about that old question of sex is technically modern enough. However, as demonstrated by their acolytes this past season, the new styles in sinning have appeared about as gay and aphrodisiacal as a performance of Way Down East produced in an old soldiers' home.

Sin, as demonstrated by the Garbo-Dietrich school, has indeed been a dreary business. While I personally may he lacking in subtlety or eroticism—rather than put up with the patent boredom evidenced by Miss Bankhead in Devil and the Deep, Thunder Below and Faithless; or rather than face the complete exhaustion of Miss Garbo, as apparent in Mad I lari., Grand Hotel, et al.; or by Miss Crawford in Letty Lynton and Rain; or Miss Dietrich in Blonde Venus and Shanghai Express—I would greatly prefer to make a fourth at bridge in a room at the Martha Washington Hotel.

Here is one fashion which can be blamed on the stage. Almost coincident with the arrival of the Garbo girls, the producers Avere forced to seek smarter material for their enlightened customers, and at that moment, the heroines of Holiday and Tomorrow' and Tomorrow were theatrically fashionable as, indeed, they are today.

Now, Mr. Barry's screen imitators usually lack anything approaching his comedy skill, so what we find in so-called modern pictures and plays are just so many Garbo girls, who sit and brood phlegmatically at their young men—or so many tall, skinny girls who lead us to believe that wealthy young women long ago eschewed the more vigorous, if primitive, manifestations of sex, reserving bed for a place in which one merely dozes languidly, smokes endless numbers of cigarettes, sips whiskey neat, and delivers long but drily amusing speeches to a properly humble young man.

■ This, of course, seems highly exciting to a small, esoteric group of theatre-goers,

and it may be that there is a subtle undercurrent of deep emotional feeling beneath the banter of the girls. All I feel is that they need cod liver oil, and a proper diet. Furthermore, I think most of us coarse customers thoroughly enjoy the frank acceptance Miss Harlow brings to the facts of life, and I am certain that many of the same customers will find the cavalier attitude of a Miss Barry in Cynara, the new picture, equally as diverting.

Properly speaking, the characters in Cynara do not have a great deal of fun. However, Miss Barry, a comely newcomer, does not, when she first sets eyes on Mr. Colman, let her underlip drop to her chin, fetch a tubercular sigh, and in general act as though she were suddenly face to face with the man who told her the market would skyrocket after election. She looks and acts throughout the proceedings as though she enjoyed being with him.

Furthermore, she brings the real warmth and charm of the play very much to the fore. There is a persuasive moral tone in this picture, and even though you are not impressed with the faithful husband who is led astray because a shop girl pleads with him for one gay interlude, or do not feel deeply sorry for him when public and family turn against him because that girl commits suicide, you do feel that the girl is flesh and blood, and that the man is a sincere and sympathetic fellow. This in spite of Mr. Ronald Colman. For, you would find it a much more impressive picture if Mr. Colman, in the role of the husband, did anything else but busy himself trying to keep his increasing waistline and his falling chin from being photographed. He is, of course, as jolly and English as ever. As usual, he brings absolutely no warmth or conviction to his work, and the time has come when he should either give up his disdain for his profession and learn something about it, or else gracefully retire to the Scots. Neither in his holiday with the youngster, nor in the trial after her suicide, nor in his subsequent scenes, does he offer a gesture or a tone which might have even an artificial emotional quality.

King Vidor has carefully reproduced the play. As it was in the theatre, it remains: a mild, well-mannered show. It adds to the credits of the current cinema season a new actress with some meat on her bones and some gaiety in her work, and this is a large step in the right direction.

■ THE WIDENING OPEN SPACES. Now that the censors either are scared to death, or dead of ennui, the producers seem utterly at a loss to take advantage of hitherto denied themes and situations for pictures. We have had two lame indications recently that they may re-discover the country just about where they left it after Birth of a Nation. The muchballyhooed Conquerors—"a God-marked gift to the public" is a venal sequel to Cimarron and deserves no attention whatsoever.

Silver Dollar, on the other hand, is a native folk tale with many odd movie characteristics. The movie, for some strange reason, takes no liberties with the story of the crazy spendthrift of Denver, and it might have been a livelier production, had they not observed such a pedantic scrupulousness. It shows Silver Dollar hanging grimly to his store until his grub-stakers make him a millionaire, and then it shows his subsequent wildness in a series of slow, but fairly amusing episodes.

It has been done in good taste as, for instance, when the hero is lured from his thinlipped, sharp-tongued pioneer wife by a fancy lady who neither betrays him nor lets him down after he is ruined, a circumstance factual enough but rather odd for the movies to present. And with the aid of Beethoven, the final episode in Silver Dollar's career, in which he wanders, broken, to the opera house —"the biggest west of the Mississippi"—and recalls the night General Grant opened it for him, is a tender, moving bit of work.

I must now turn to the inevitable qualification and warn you that Edward G. Robinson takes up most of the footage in this picture. Thus, a really interesting tale halts at every turn to allow Mr. Robinson to make a speech. With grunts and groans and shouts and Italian dialect, he does give a wonderful impression of a mining buckaroo, slightly afflicted with asthma, lumbago and epilepsy.

■ BOX OFFICE JITTERS. The town was full of executives last month who threw money recklessly to the trades in a seasonal buying spree. They bought actors, plays, stories and men, like so many hop-headed maharajahs. As an indication of what their largesse will bring them, I give you a list of movies about to pour into the country:

(1)a story about a male parachute jumper; (2) a story about a female parachute jumper; (3) a studio rally in the Grand Hotel manner called If I Had A Million; (4) a studio rally in the Grand Hotel manner called Luxury Liner, in which another highly paid group of actors learn the pity of it all on the narrow decks of a studio steamer; (5) an old-time Baptist pageant displaying a number of costly actors who rush around an arena in hospital shirts, while five hundred chippies do a Minsky strip in a Roman palace: This little jewel is called The Sign of the Cross; (6) at least a half dozen gim-crack jungle pictures and, of course, finally, some simple reportorial sketches of the mores of department store girls, men's room attendants and bankers.

Yet the answer, "that's Hollywood", doesn't really answer it. After listening to writers who loathe their work, to actors who are kicked around by supervisors, to supervisors who try only to please producers and to producers who treat each other with a lupine predacity which would make a Mexican cutthroat blush for sbame, one comes upon the great weakness of the movies. Nobody out there, with rare exceptions, really likes to make motion pictures. Try to imagine, for example, a more lugubrious sight than the spectacle of a reputable novelist such as Theodore Dreiser, selling Jennie Gerhardt to a producer for a fat lump of money when, three to one, the producer never has read— nor ever will read—the book; while Dreiser, who probably saw the Gish girls in Orphans of the Storm, writes garrulous articles for nickel magazines, telling the boys how they should manufacture pictures; i.e., let Dreiser direct them all.

I have a quick remedy to offer to those young men who honestly want to work and find their crafts suffocated with whining elderly gentlemen: gather together the Avriters who hate what they write, the reviewers who loathe the things they review, the literary critics who live with (Continued from page 48)

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booksellers; the producers who read market reports instead of manuscripts, and the artists who design pink bathroom fixtures, and kill them quietly but neatly—and as quickly as possible.

a DEATH IN THE MORNING. Asked to

write his own criticism of the movie adaptation of his A Farewell to Arms, Mr. Hemingway probably would give it no more credit than one could find in a few four-letter Anglo-Saxon words; yet, compared with other adaptations and other movies of the year, Mr. Hemingway might as easily discover that he has been done very well by indeed.

Fortunately, the movie screen play hears no resemblance to the crude show fashioned for the stage by Lawrence Stallings some time ago, and again fortunately for everybody concerned, at least one of the main characters in this latest attack on the Hemingway thriller is a fine actor.

In considering any tale fashioned in Hollywood, two inevitable considerations preclude any real academic discussion of the intrinsic merit of the production: what was the real intent of the manufacturer, where did the original conception run afoul Mr. I lays' censors, federated women's clubs, or other social and religious heckling associations? With A Farewell to Arms there is still another irritating hurdle to direct criticism, and that is the inherent problem of adaptation.

To get on with my little game of question and answers, it is obvious from the picture itself that the manufacturer had no queer sales idea or sudden box office fright, hut that he intended to give this picture an honest treatment. In order to do that, it was necessary to include as much of Mr. Hemingway as possible in the story; that, too, has been done, and if you know your Mr. Hemingway, you realize that what valiants are left in the rocking chair censor brigades will explode many a blood vessel over those hits of dialogue which are lifted intact from the novel.

As seems inevitable with adaptors, the authors of the movie allowed their respect for Hemingway to carry them astray. Any license is permissible in adaptation as long as it does not destroy the focus of the story. I think they were wise in leaving out most of the war and making the simple love story of the tale the main body of the movie; it wasn't necessary to "follow the hook", as long as they developed their story logically. But, for adaptors, they did as well as they probably could.

They develop their characterizations clumsily, hut honestly, early in the picture. Rinaldi—one of the most charming characters in recent fiction

Fergy, the padre, nurse Barclay and the hero are brought formally hut correctly into the pictlire as soon as possible. In the first good scene, and one which is as genuinely moving as any you will ever see in a movie, the director wisely takes the emphasis of the story away from the hero and gives it to the heroine. 1 say wisely, simply because there are so few leading men in movies or theatre with enough maturity and talent to he convincing, and while this emphasis does emasculate the virility of the tale, it would have been too much to have expected Gary Cooper to have carried the burden of the drama.

This first good scene, incidentally, is as tender and beautifully done as any author could ask. It is a brief episode. The young officer seduces his casual acquaintance in a cemetery; in the lucid prose of the author, she asks him his name; she sadly quotes: "and the young lady sat in the park warming her lost innocence"; she asks him to be good to her. Director Borzage surrounds his couple with a soft grey photographic frame and stringed music, and Helen Hayes takes the movie, wraps it up, and carries it home with her. After this scene, a director would have been criminally insane to have bothered with his leading man. And from this point on, had the authors let the war dialogue go and watched only their lovers, they would have had a simpler but truer show.

If, of course, Mussolini's boys had not run and told Mr. Hoover, the retreat from the Piave might have furnished a crescendo for the final tragic episode in the picture. The retreat originally was in the picture. Perhaps because they were heckled into finally making this episode cloudy and ambiguous, because the Italian Embassy got into such a fearful lather about it, the authors and the director lost hold of the story. Whatever the reason, they suddenly distort the character of Rinaldi until they have him stoop to the low theatrical device of intercepting the heroine's love letters. Thus the hero is at the front and does not hear from his lover.

The heroine meantime goes alone to Switzerland to have her baby, and thus, for the sake of international amity, we lose the dramatic retreat of the army and the lover's flight across the lake to Switzerland.

As it is now, the hero deserts because he has had no mail (and the army, presumably, goes along just to keep him company, because we still see the officers being stopped at the river and shot). The hero escapes from the army, eventually, rows across the lake and reaches his little wife just as she is dying. But all of this is almost meaningless—not because it wasn't the way Hemingway wrote it, hut because Rinaldi becomes, by the grace of Mussolini, a mid-Victorian dens ex machina, and because nobody connected with the picture believed in this part of the story.

One unjustifiable compromise occurs at the very end of the picture, but before the Armistice is used as a curtain line, Miss Hayes is given the hospital scene with undiluted Hemingway and when she has finished asking her husband to have lots of girls, and when she tells him simply she hates to die, you might excuse a multitude of errors.

While certainly it was a wonderful opportunity for any actress, I nevertheless can not recall ever having seen a better performance from any young woman that Miss Hayes gives in A Farewell to Anns. The warmth, the spirit, and the tragedy of the book are all in her characterization, and for

this alone, half as good a movie would he worth your time.

Adolphe Menjou either has been feeding on cod liver oil, or else had a deep desire to work, or else Rinaldi is a fool-proof part. When Miss Hayes is not making Cooper's work superfluous, Menjou lifts him out of his lethargy with a gay, spirited and sympathetic performance.

I don't, of course, blame Mr. Cooper for his deficiencies in A Farewell to Arms. He is an innocuous young man, who at least looks and acts like a man; hut he is first and last a movie actor, that is to say, no actor at all. He is, furthermore, in company far better than any he has been with before.

■ COMMENCEMENT. Now that Hollywood's academy of belles-lettres has announced its awards for the best acting, etc., of the year, I feel it only fair to my constituents to announce the final result of my own annual secret balloting, ami to assure you that it was a fair and square election.

Best actress: Helen Hayes.

Best actor: Lionel Barrymore with no competitors whatsoever.

Best picture: Redd leaded Woman. Because il was the boldest and funniest.

Best Direction: Mamoulian's Love Me Tonight, with the qualification that A Nous La Liberie be given the foreign prize.

Best Photography: None worth award.

Best Dialogue: Ditto.

Worst actor: Deadlock—Irving Pichel and Lionel Atwill.

Worst actress: Deadlock with Sidney Fox holding slight lead over Norma Shearer.

Worst Movie: Terrific deadlock with Blonde Venus holding slight lead over W hite Zombie, Bring 'Em Back Alive and Murders in Rue Morgue.

Best Hollywood Gag: Paramount's executive's exodus into the Fox wilderness.

If any of the aforementioned people care to write or call at these offices. I shall be pleased to give them (for the nominal sum of 69 cents) my book about the movies, neatly autographed.