The screen

HELEN BROWN NORDEN

Sex is falling off in the latest Hollywood releases, but the future offers hope with Mmes. West and Harlow

■ THE LAPSE IN SEX.—It may be Spring everywhere else in the country, with its attendant stigmata of wood anemones, budling box hedges, and birds mating like mad all over the place (laying my entire ornithological knowledge right on the table), but something has gone awry in the recent Hollywood output. Sex is falling off. When I say Sex, it is up to you to think of Mae West, Jean Harlow or Marlene Dietrich—according to your respective age, early environment, Binet-Simon test average and general glandular activity. It is a ten to one shot that you do not think of George Arliss, Jackie Searl, H. B. Warner, or two black panthers and a honey hear. If you do, you are something for Dr. Freud and Dr. Jung to go right into their laboratories and get excited about.

Yet that is about all that Hollywood has been giving us lately. We ask for sex and they give us George Arliss. It is very depressing to the young and hot-blooded. Let us hope that it augurs no permanent sterilization, hut merely the lull before the storm. After all, in the offing looms Miss West, as only she can loom, in It Ain't No Sin. Runners-up in the cantharides entries are Joan Crawford in Sadie McKee, Jean Harlow in 100% Pure, Claudette Colbert in Cleopatra and Anna Sten in Resurrection. So we must all take heart and relax.

■ EILI, EILI.—Twentieth Century have stolen a leaf from Warner Brothers' Biographies Every Child Should Know, and the result is the apotheosis of the farmilia Rothschild in the handsomely mounted, hut less carefully documented, new epic of the screen, The House of Rothschild.

It is the best picture George Arliss has had for a long time, and, in its initial New York run, played to capacity houses at a $2 top, with seats on reservation weeks in advance. It goes to show what a meaty combination of costume romance, melodrama, semi-historical gossip and heavy racial propaganda can do at the boxoffice these days.

Appearing first as old Mayer Rothschild, the founder of the family, and later as Nathan Rothschild, head of the famous house of international hankers, Mr. Arliss is in great form and goes through all his tricks of gesture and voice with a fine finish and that undefinable quality known as "style". It is the sort of a role customtailored for his talents, and he could probably play it blind-folded and with one arm tied behind his hack, by this time. As smooth as silk, and as slick as ever, he guides the House of Rothschild through its historic banking triumphs, pokes a long finger into European politics, is the power behind the Allies which defeats Napoleon, and leads his five brothers in a fierce battle against the Prussian persecution of the Jews.

In order that we may make no mistake as to who is the villain, Boris Karloff is cast as that most vicious Gentile, Baron Ledrantz; while the beautiful young Jewish heroine, as innocent and as fair as a spring dawn, is Miss Loretta Young.

■ FATHERLY LOVE AGAIN.—Years and years and years ago (I was of course hut a child and had scarcely smoked my first cigar), H. B. Warner made a silent film version of Sorrel and Son. Now he has done it again, in a British talking picture, released here by United Artists. They should have saved it for Father's Day, as it certainly makes every mother feel like a snake in the grass.

Mr. Warner, who still seems in a mild way to suggest Our Lord, despite the severance of his connection with Cecil B. DeMille, plays Sorrel with a sort of a sad gallantry calculated to wring the withers of all witnesses, and so it does. Mr. Warner has dignity to his finger tips, even when he is scrubbing floors and rustling trunks up and down stairs—a gentleman of the old school, by Gad, sir—and it is nice to see him again, even as a father who suffers and sacrifices and then suffers again. The son, as a child, is played by Peter Penrose, and as a young man, by Hugh Williams, who has a good voice hut too many jowls. A trim, crisp young girl named Winifred Shotter does very well as the hoy's sweetheart and might he watched by Hollywood spies on the look-out for new talent.

■ PACIFISM PRO OR CON?—Columbia Pictures have taken Ferenč Molnár's celebrated novel, The Paul Street Boys, and made a movie out of it, which they have chosen to call No Greater Glory. They don't expect to make much money on it and they probably won't, hut they don't care: it is their sop to Art. Frank Borzage was the director, and I must say he did a rather thrilling job. It is no easy matter to assemble fifty to a hundred small boys, put them through their paces, and turn out a picture that has some degree of naturalness, sincerity, and a great deal of drama. You have to have a knack, you know.

The catch is this: Columbia, it is understood, believes the picture to be a hitter indictment of war. Actually, it is one of the most effective hits of pro-militarism ever imagined. Maybe my child psychology is not all it should be—after all, I don't get much practice—hut it seems to me that any small hoy, seeing this picture, would go right out and want to join the army at the nearest recruiting station. The plot of the story is the rivalry between two gangs of boys over a vacant lot. They dress up as soldiers, they have officers, they drill, they study military tactics, and they eventually wage a pitched battle. They are ready to die for their cause, and one of them does—hut instead of being treated as a dread example of the horrors of war, the dead child is regarded as a great hero, and the implication seems to he that there is "no greater glory" than to give up one's life in the name of patriotism. If this is a pacifist tract, then I am Emma Goldman.

A new discovery, George Breakston, plays the young martyr. A queer-looking, scrawny child who resembles a freshly-hatched eaglet with anemia, he infuses his scenes with a great deal of pathos and courage. There is not a dry eye in the house. Jackie Searl, the most insolent-looking brat in pictures, plays the villain with such skill that you want to jump right into the picture and smack him; while Frankie Darro (whom I have insisted on putting in every picture for the past three months—chiefly because his was the only child actor's name I knew) turns ouL to he a tall, handsome young lad with incipient sex appeal. I suppose there's nothing to he done to keep these children from growing up and confusing the critics.

■ BUCK IN THE JUNGLE.—When Frank Buck, the celebrated wild animal snatcher, made his first picture, Bring; 'Em Back Alive, it was a highly exciting and successful production. His second, Wild Cargo, is somewhat less so. Perhaps we effete city-dwellers have become a little satiated with jungle denizens. Perhaps we no longer have the same passionate interest in an elephant we once had. After all, to the layman, there is not much variety in wild animals. After the first ten water buffalo, they all begin to look alike.

The trouble with this picture is that the whole business of hunting and trapping has been made to look too easy. Apparently, all you have to do to catch a tiger is to go out in the woods, dig a hole, and the tiger falls in it. Pooh! It's a waltz. The animals never seem to put up much of a resistance, outside of looking mildly annoyed at the whole procedure, and this goes on through the entire film. They trap an elephant, they trap a gibbon, they trap a python, they trap a tiger. It all goes like clockwork, and after a while, it begins to pall. You begin to wish that just once they would fail—and that the gibbon would trap them for a change.

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The sound effects are also a little confusing. Perhaps it is true that all animals make the same noises when they are caught, or perhaps they have got them mixed up. Because there are times when you could swear that either they have swapped the python's voice for the tiger's or else you have gone crazy.

There are some fascinating things in the picture, however: the incredible skill of the work-elephants (all belled like so many kittens) ; the death battle between the python and the black panther; the escape of the giant python in the camp, with all the chained animals paralyzed with terror; the invasion of the camp by an army of colossal and horrendous land crabs; the beauty of a man-eating tiger moving swiftly through the jungle; and the comedy relief in the form of a continuous wrestling match between a baby monkey and an utterly absurd, round, fluffy little black honey bear.

■ THE PERFECT CRIME.—Otto Kruger, who went out to Hollywood to play character parts and found himself a smash hit in romantic leads, instead, has been coming along fine—but he won't go very far if they keep on putting him in pictures like RKO's The Crime Doctor. His long years of struggle on the Broadway stage stand him in good stead, and his work has always a certain surety about it which can make a ham out of the best of the Hollywood-incubated heartbreakers, but nevertheless, he can't long hold up under the strain of fantastic plots and absent-minded direction. There are. moments when this murder mystery almost becomes exciting—but then you find out in the end that it was all just a story made up by an author who wanted to write the perfect crime. The crime may be perfect, but the picture is not, although Karen Morley's long, lean face and Judith Wood's impersonation of a blackmailer are something of a help.

■ ODD TIDBITS DEPARTMENT—In the meantime, while waiting for Mae West, something for you to mull over is the thought of Norma Shearer as Mrs. Robert Browning in The Barretts of Wimpole Street. Of course, this could have been much worse. Remember, the first idea was to cast Marion Davies in the role. Now, if we could only get Clark Gable to play Browning, we would have something. But don't ask me what.

Pauline Lord, who is practically the only living stage star—with the exception of Katharine Cornell and Maude Adams— who has not yet been in the movies, has at last thrown up the sponge and will go to Hollywood to appear in Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (not quite of the Anna Christie school) with Charlotte Henry and W. C. Fields. What the movies will do with Miss Lord is anybody's guess. They probably think she is a character actress and will try to play her up as a cross between Old Mother Mary Carr and Marie Dressier. Photographically, she has not got what the boys call glamour (pronounced "glammer"). She should take a look at the films made last season by Judith Anderson and Fay Bainter, equally fine actresses and equally ineligible for the Wampus Baby Stars group of 1934. There is one thing to be thankful for: at least they can not do much to distort or alter that lovely, sobbing voice of hers.

We will now leave you with the fascinating news that the latest addition to Madame Tussaud's famous waxworks collection in London is none other than Mae West; that Design for Living was banned in Java on the ground of immorality; that Anna Sten has a fourteen-year-old step-daughter; that Marlene Dietrich gets that gaunt and delicate look by sucking her cheeks in (and when she gets tired of doing that, they rouge her jaw-line heavily) ; that Cecil B. DeMille tried very hard to connect up Our Lord with Cleopatra; and that the French are crazy about Katharine Hepburn, except that they find her figure a trifle sparse for romantic implications.

(Additional reviews of the current motion pictures will be found on page 69)