The Play and Screen
Skinner, Richard Dana
THE PLAY AND SCREEN By RICHARD DANA SKINNER The Women Have Their Way MISS Le Gallienne has brought to her copious Fourteenth-Street stage another of those incomparable little plays by the...
...That is all the play amounts to...
...At the Roxy Theatre...
...Vera succeeds in betraying him into the hands of the Cossacks who, mysteriously enough, do not hang him for having killed a prince, but merely flog him and let him go...
...To one it brings madness, and the young ensign, whom fate places in charge of the ship, has to shoot him...
...The technicolor process used gives a brilliant and harmonious effect, adding enormously to the richness and clarity of the scenes...
...THE PLAY AND SCREEN By RICHARD DANA SKINNER The Women Have Their Way MISS Le Gallienne has brought to her copious Fourteenth-Street stage another of those incomparable little plays by the Quintero brothers-and once more we can be grateful to her for providing the kind of institution where such delicious nothings can flourish and bring back to the theatre some of its native gaiety and charm...
...So far as technical excellence goes, one must admit that enormous strides have been made...
...Serafin and Joaquin Quintero have chosen as their special field the lazy, peaceful, sunny and comfortable section of Spain known as Andalusia...
...Yegor, the bandit, has fallen in love with a Russian princess (the action all takes place some years before the Bolshevik revolution) only to discover that her brother, Prince Sergei, is the one who is responsible for the disgrace and death of Yegor's own sister, Nadja...
...That is the end...
...It is a picture of tense and tragic interest, in which both dialogue and sound effects play an essential and creative part...
...The village priest is their companion and guide in most things...
...To others it brings sullen bravado, to a few the agonized courage of despair...
...In all these respects, the picture deserves the highest praise...
...Each character might as well bear a label instead of a name, as in the morality plays...
...That is why so many village plays are little more than a parade of types, monotonous in their conformity to set ideas...
...Someone else typifies innocent young love, another rigid old age, another miserliness, another villainy and so forth...
...Instead of recognizing, for example, that there is something of the gossip in everyone, the authors pack all the essence of gossip into one person...
...In a typical Quintero play, you find yourself among people to whom the main preoccupations of life are love, jealousy, spite, gossip, good-natured interference in neighbor's affairs, poetry, song, marriage, birth, sickness, death or ripening and wise old age...
...The Rogue Song IN THEIR full-color presentation of a Russian operetta, with music by Franz Lehar and Herbert Stothart, and the distinguished baritone, Lawrence Tibbett as the star, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer have done an ambitious piece of work...
...They never so much as touch hands...
...As the exhausted air becomes more and more poisoned, one, then two, then three of the men die...
...At last only two remain...
...Adolfo, a young lawyer from Madrid, visiting the small town on a matter of business requiring a few weeks, becomes the target for all feminine eyes...
...Men Without Women IN CONTRAST to the weaknesses of The Rogue Song, the recent Fox production of a submarine disaster and rescue, based on a story by John Ford and James K. McGuin-ness, brings out the last ounce of drama in material to which only the sound screen could do justice...
...At the Astor Theatre...
...The sound reproduction is also startlingly clear, giving full scope to Tibbett's magnificent voice, from robust and ringing fortissimi to pianissimo passages of the rarest delicacy...
...At the Civic Repertory Theatre...
...No matter what he does, the women will have it that betrothal and marriage are a certainty...
...It is one of those rare moments in the lives of two people when confession brings the strength to face an issue bravely...
...He returns to his bandits, after the fickle Vera at last admits she loves him, and after they exchange some silly verbiage about a possible future day when class distinctions will no longer divide them...
...Ownership of the land is a matter of course to them...
...The Open Door FOLLOWING the European custom of a one-act curtain raiser, Miss Le Gallienne also gives, as a prelude to the Quintero play, this two-character sketch by Alfred Sutro...
...He is thought to be in love with Juanita La Rosa, although, in fact, he has seen her but once on the street and has never exchanged a word with her...
...The reason for his hasty departure is his discovery that he loves her...
...The acting of Kenneth MacKenna and Frank Albertson, Farrell Macdonald and several others make a fine contribution to this unusual picture...
...On the other hand, the earlier stages of the story have the true ring of romance and plenty of color and action to fill the eye...
...One must stay behind-forever...
...The tube can only be operated from the inside...
...Never, perhaps, since the earliest Chaplin slapstick films have so many worn-out wheezes been resurrected- the fat man breaking through a barrel of rain water, the decrepit shaving scene, in which a razor is sharpened on a cobblestone and a face almost carved to pieces, the mule . . . but why go into further painful detail...
...In the meantime, you watch the work of the rescuers-the destroyers speeding through the night, the frantic efforts of the divers to clear one of the torpedo tubes...
...Sudden orders bring them back to the ship...
...Yet, in the delicacy of its shadings, and in the subtle differences with which gossip has its sway over individuals, you have at once the simplicity of theme and the complexity of treatment which constitute the results of rare observation and artistic workmanship...
...What follows is reminiscent, essentially, of such plays as Journey's End-the spectacle of men peering together over the precipice of death...
...The least incident serves to illumine more and more clearly the inwardness of each man's character-as in the battle over the oxygen tank...
...But in the sequences of the story itself, and in the details of plot and action, the producers have been guilty of a mediocrity and even of an absurdity which seem hardly possible in these exacting days...
...the Roxy Theatre...
...Until one has watched a successful color screening such as this, it is hard to realize how dependent we are for visual impression upon distinctions and gradations of color, and the extent of the limitations which mere black and white impose upon a director...
...His least action, word or gesture is noted and given a fictitious meaning...
...She extracts this much truth from him, and then lets him know that his love is reciprocated...
...They are not, however, simple people...
...The play is an unalloyed delight...
...It is merely the parting conversation between a man and the wife of his best friend...
...The harvests, the seasons, the mosquitoes and flies are subjects of distinct and immediate concern...
...They are just people...
...It is mightily worth seeing...
...In short, this production gives rather more than hints of the talking color-screen possibilities, but shows something approaching bankruptcy in script and arrangement...
...They are run down by a tramp steamer during a storm on the China Sea...
...The main story itself grows weak and straggling toward the end, and at last becomes utterly incomprehensible...
...If he shows indifference, they say he is wearing a clever mask...
...Then comes the escape of those still alive, ejected by compressed air through the tube...
...You have here one of those situations of universal interest-namely the thoughts and actions of a group of men trapped in a sunken submarine and facing a slow and apparently certain death...
...There is, for example, a ballet scene given in full which would be wearisome beyond measure if the color scheme did not play an equally important part with line and motion...
...There are also many individual scenes in which the excellent direction of Lionel Barrymore raises the dramatic intensity to a fine point...
...In the Lady from Alfaqueque (at Miss Le Gallienne's) and in A Hundred Years Old (produced with Otis Skinner) we have two other recent examples of Quintero charm and effectiveness...
...If he shows interest, they say "I told you so...
...Moreover, Miss Le Gallienne has done splendidly by the little play...
...At the Civic Repertory Theatre...
...To make matters worse, none of this burlesque has the least connection with the story...
...They are not trying to live according to some brilliant philosopher's code of morals or conduct...
...Take, for example, the alleged comedy relief supplied by the two servants of Yegor, the singing bandit...
...And-they have their way...
...They remain reasonably close to the soil...
...As these plays by the Quinteros have been ably translated by Helen and Harley Granville-Barker, and are eminently suitable for amateur use, a few words about the Quinteros might be of interest...
...They know the acute pangs of homesickness when they leave their native village...
...Miss Le Gallienne as the woman and Donald Cameron as the man go through the little scene with the utmost restraint and unspoken eloquence...
...Yegor kills him, and then carries off the Princess Vera to be practically his slave in the gypsy camp...
...They are the crew of the S-13 on shore leave...
...The fact that Yegor sings his way through life with improvised songs gives a plausible excuse for Tibbett's glorious voice to be heard at all times and under all conditions...
...But it seems to me that these wise and talented brothers have exhibited some of their very best qualities in The Women Have Their Way...
...Its theme is the power of good-natured gossip to turn an imaginary situation into a real one...
...Here they have found many of the springs of universal life untouched by the complexities of industrialism or the special problems which, from the very fact that we call them modern, must soon become dated and lifeless...
...The Quinteros have avoided this tedious business by recognizing that each human being is, within himself, a miniature of the world of human beings, subject to all the temptations, and more or less alive to all the impulses, good and bad, which give life its adventurous goal...
...The Women Have Their Way is an excellent example of Quintero treatment...
...It is as out of keeping as a series of custard-pie episodes would be in such an operetta as The Vagabond King...
...Your first glimpse of them is in the international meeting-place, Shanghai...
...She is utterly lovely and picturesque as its demure heroine, and with the able assistance of Egon Brecher, as the village priest, Leona Roberts as the chief match-maker, Donald Cameron as Adolfo and Josephine Hutchinson as one of the priest's nieces, the play swings along with an almost perfect ensemble...
...The mistake of so many writers in portraying village life is to assume that people are simple in simple surroundings and complex in complex surroundings...
...The more he denies any interest, the more certain the women become that he is hopelessly infatuated...
Vol. 11 • February 1930 • No. 15
