The Play and Screen

...Suss has sought the wrong roads, both that to power and the one to revenge...

...Naemi, fleeing from his advances, falls from the balcony of the house and is killed...

...In the play, the characters have only their own strength to draw upon...

...The duke dies as a result of Suss's treachery- but Suss himself must be a sacrifice to the infuriated mob...

...The Countess comes to a tea at the Smith's hotel apartment in Paris-largely in search of a new contributor to her charities...

...Thurston Hall plays the part of the unhappy Jake, Charles Kennedy, Walter Vonnegut and Edward Donnelly give life and contrast to the parts of Jake's cronies, Jean Adair does well as the wife, and Ethel Morrison brightens the entire play with her one scene as the Countess of Billhorn...

...Starting with this mechanical advantage, the picture, through its careful planning and arrangement, begins to illustrate some of the important points of dramatic freedom which the talkies open up...

...There were but two characters in it that emerged from the dismal mess-one the old Rabbi Gabriel, uncle of Josef Suss, and the other Suss's ethereal daughter, barely outlined, as if she might have been a glimmer of the better self which Suss had abandoned in his lust for power...

...The large cast is well selected and directed, with two outstanding performances by Moscovitch and by Malcolm Keen as the duke...

...The screen permits you to follow the characters from one room to another, from the house to the garden, from Disraeli's estate to Downing Street...

...Against the men and women in power one never ceased to feel arrayed the force of the mob, the resentful tortured masses of the duchy, cursing their libertine and spendthrift duke, choking with rage against the powerful and unscrupulous chancelor, Suss...

...Her family fortune is built on whisky...

...Disraeli is listening, crouched on the small of his back, with his hat tilted forward to hide his enigmatic face...

...This play is the third or fourth program offering of the New York Theatre Assembly, now occupying the old Princess Theatre...

...Range and freedom have always been their advantage over the stage...

...He has placed her in charge of his mystical old uncle, Rabbi Gabriel...

...In the book, the characters, though individually alive, attain their proportions chiefly as symbols of great forces in conflict...

...At the Assembly Theatre...

...Gladstone sits down...

...It is the successful combination of self-explanatory speech with the established freedom of the screen in picturing atmosphere which is slowly giving the talkies a dramatic preeminence...

...Lack of proper synchronization of sound and film often resulted in distressing moments, comparable only to those earliest days of the motion picture when, in the middle of a sequence, the projecting machine would falter, jerk violently and leave you for a few desperate seconds facing a still picture of suspended action...

...Yet it had certain remarkable points...

...The latter's activities form the main subject-matter of the Paris incidents, and by the time Don Marquis is through narrating them, there is little in the field of blackmail, imaginary babies and the like which is left unexplored...

...At Erlanger's Theatre...

...Disraeli is probably one of the best-known plays of recent years throughout the United States...

...From this instant, Suss loses all thought of power...

...There are not more than ten seconds in the whole length of Disraeli when the speech fails to have all the crisp accuracy indicated by the lip movement...

...Among them was the picture it gave of the teeming life of central Europe before the work of Frederick the Great had begun to consolidate the German principalities against the empire...

...Yet all the meanness, all the despicable hypocrisy, all the senseless pride of the dozens of other characters could not destroy the impression of vitality...

...They are real -so is she...

...It is this sense of the mob that one loses utterly in the present play...

...This daughter, Naemi, is the one luminous spot in Suss's life...

...His latest comedy to reach the stage is an amusing affair in comic-strip key, with no pretension whatever to distinction-unless it be in those delicious moments when he draws an expert picture of an English countess making her first direct contacts with an American bootlegger...

...But up to now, the conventions of pantomime and interrupting titles have meant a corresponding loss...

...At the Central Theatre...

...The redeeming features of the occasion are the fundamental decency and humanness of Jake and his wife, and the hilarious moments when the Countess of Billhorn is on the stage...

...It makes rather gross, not to say trite, comedy...

...Here you have a repetition of the views of the man in the street...

...Life flowed abundantly through its long pages-lecherous, distorted life, always in shadow and in murky places, life which would have perished in the open sunlight...

...The scene is the one unobvious twist in the whole play...

...Up to the present, mechanical imperfections have served chiefly to break the illusion which the older silent screen had succeeded in establishing...

...Yet I venture to say that if one were to see the play again, after seeing the present screen version, one would come away with a distinct sense of disappointment...

...Like the book, the play suffers from an overdose of illustrative material...

...Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of human presence-but it can be said with equal truth that no theatrical staging can ever take the place of illustrative atmosphere...

...The settings and costumes are sumptuous...

...The story in play form becomes primarily the story of Suss and the duke, of their first meeting at the gaming tables, when Suss offers his credit at a crucial moment, of their subsequent strange companionship in extortion and worse, of Suss's cynical maneuvers to get the daughter of Councilor Weissensee as the duke's mistress, and of Weissensee's slow revenge through discovering the forest hiding place of Suss's own daughter and through leading the duke to that place...

...Ashley Dukes is the author of the version now being given under the auspices of Charles Dilling-ham, with Maurice Moscovitch playing the leading role of Josef Suss Oppenheimer-that chancelor who, in Feuchtwanger's story, ruled and ruined the duchy of Wurtemberg in the early eighteenth century...

...No one interested in the acting art should miss seeing Disraeli as an index of what the future talking screen holds...

...All this, of course, is an old story in the movies...

...There was something heavily unhealthy about it, as of incense used to cover the odors of decay...

...This gives you at once the setting of Disraeli's activities as the director, not only of a government, but of a people...

...The material is more or less obvious-the pathetic old wife seeking her first chance at glamour, the daughter who has been to a finishing school, Jake's old cronies who accompany him as a bodyguard in his misery, the ex-American chorus girl, widow of an English title and now living by polite blackmail...

...From this point on, the screen version follows the play quite closely, but without the break-up of action resulting from the convention of acts and curtains, and with a wealth of illustrative detail that off-stage action in a play can never furnish...

...The original novel has been freely and often criticized...

...It charmed and delighted audiences for many a season...

...The warnings of Rabbi Gabriel are fulfilled...

...In this story alone, there is, of course, ample dramatic material, and Ashley Dukes has wrought many scenes of eloquent intensity which Maurice Moscovitch plays to the hilt-and occasionally too far beyond...

...A future business deal is arranged at once-with all that powerful directness of which certain English women are capable...

...But the net impressions of the play and the book are utterly different...

...To illustrate-the screen story opens with a stump speech being made in Hyde Park, an anti-Disraeli speech...

...The book described an earthly hell-but it was not a book of ghosts and puppets...

...Disraeli rises slowly and begins his reply...

...She is, at first, haughty and bored...

...Everything's Jake concerns itself with the unwilling trip to Paris of Jake Smith, successful Long Island bootlegger and tavern-keeper...

...Josef Suss IT WAS inevitable that someone should seize upon the dramatic possibilities of Lion Feuchtwanger's novel, Power, and turn it into play form...

...Dukes has written a play in which plot dominates substance...

...In the first place, it marks a decided step forward in the mechanics of vocal reproduction...

...A good bootlegger is a man after her own heart...

...The screen re-creates, as the play could never quite do, the sense of time and place and environment...

...He must pay the price of a lost soul...

...In brief, Mr...

...Illusion in entertainment is everything, and speech that lags behind the lips leaves illusion a sorry mess...

...Then you are carried to the House of Commons during a speech by Gladstone himself...

...We see a conflict of persons rather than principles...

...But the duke is no respector of purity and innocence...

...Then you are carried to a corner of the Liberal Club, where Gladstone's name is magic...

...But all her sporting blood is warmed at the sight of Jake and his cronies...

...THE PLAY AND SCREEN By RICHARD DANA SKINNER Everything's Jake DON MARQUIS is a versatile writer of many moods, evidently torn somewhat in his own mind between the things he would like best to write and what he believes to be the public appetite for a very different twist of the pen...

...He lives for but one purpose, revenge, knowing full well that in bringing the downfall of the duke, he is accomplishing his own downfall as well...

...By this third stroke, you see the man in his whole surrounding atmosphere-an impression vastly more solid and real than you can possibly gather from even the most skilful exposition of a play...

...It was a curious combination of cynicism and insight, of dripping sensuality and the perception of finer possibilities, of pseudo-mysticism and brutal realism...

...In brief, the sense of atmosphere and reality is constantly being heightened and reinforced...

...Growing mechanical perfection in the talkies brings a basis for real and healthy competition...

...Even though the moral of the tale points to the emptiness of lust in all its forms, whether for power, the flesh or revenge, the plot centers so largely on the corruption of the ducal court that the play tends to become a pageant of glittering evil...

...At the end, even revenge loses its flavor...

...Disraeli ONE begins to gather real hope in the future of the talkies after seeing George Arliss in the Vitaphone production of Disraeli...