The Play and Screen

...It is not even a good horror story, because it lamely attempts to throw too much sympathy to its abnormal heroine, and so obscures and retards the action...

...She always manages to plod doggedly through such dangerous passages and to swing triumphantly into the kind of scenes she does best...

...By a sort of invincible charity, she must assume for these egotistical and neurotic heroines compensating qualities which are entirely her own and do not belong to the women of the play...

...The result is unfair likewise to the theatre itself, for there are probably not more than two or three actresses with the native equipment of Miss Cornell, and her work is needed badly in plays that really measure up to her talent...

...There is nothing pathetic in the fact that she is finally left completely alone the very morning of her acquittal-nothing, that is, unless one means by pathos the hopeless tendencies of any strictly pathological case...

...The hope was short lived, since even the screen version retains American sailors who dance in formation like ballet girls...

...But she leaves you with the impression that her technique is not very solid...

...But the best acting of all is by Robert Williams as Sara's unsuccessful suitor, Johnnie Coles...

...Holiday was the result- one of the richest little comedies of many a season...

...It is a case of a little understanding going a long way-and that, I submit, seems mightily like fresh air...

...It can only be explained on the ground that Miss Cornell, whose glowing character emerged so brilliantly in Shaw's Candida, undergoes some mental aberration in appraising a part which makes her read into the character a hundred subtleties never dreamed of by the author...

...At the Empire Theatre...

...There were rumors, perhaps unfounded, that some of his scenes in Holiday were partly written by himself...

...Only three or four scenes are good on purely dramatic grounds...

...In other words, through an exaggeration of that process by which every artist tries to sink into and understand a role, she bestows much of her own grace and womanly charm and intellect on a wholly unworthy character...

...To make matters worse, she creates a successful alibi by involving a married man who had befriended her honestly, and asking him to swear in court that she had spent the fatal hours with him...

...Once more we have Miss Cornell playing the sentimentalized version of a degenerate-a rather worse version this time than either Iris March of the Green Hat or the lace-making heroine of The Letter...

...A personality of importance had come to Broadway...

...During the initial stages, I began to be quite hopeful that the producers had at last found a method of eliminating the dancing chorus boy and of making the operetta form keep some sense of illusion...

...Dishonored Lady OF ALL the infernal rubbish ever put together by two intelligent playwrights and presented by a distinguished producer with an even more distinguished star, this play deserves the prize money...

...Donn Cook as the more or less insufferable Trues-dale, and Katherine Leslie as the more insufferable Evie Lawrence are excellent...

...She is a born actress as well as a singer...

...As usual, Arthur Hopkins has supplied an excellent supporting cast...

...It has wit, tenderness, simplicity, a pleasant understanding of the ways of those who can afford to telephone from New York to Paris, and an unexpected firmness in dealing with the squalls that beset the first year of marriage...

...Moreover, when the ridiculous dance numbers were finally resorted to, it was always quite evident that they were unnecessary, and only inserted as a sop to alleged or supposed public demand...

...Or, more likely still, there will always be at least one good playwright a year who will think it worth his while to write a play especially for her...

...But it is significant, I think, of screen possibilities that in the initial chorus numbers and throughout many of the scenes which were entirely conventional in the theatre, the singing was quite spontaneous, with the singers spread about naturally and acting reasonably well in the fashion of human beings...

...Hopkins, the producer, imported direct from New York amateur dramatics Miss Hope Williams...

...It tells the story of two men who marry "on the rebound" from broken engagements and of a third man who fails to rebound...

...But at an arbitrary signal, a Negro chorus in scanty and tinseled costumes appeared to go through an utterly banal routine...

...The scene abruptly went Harlem and cabaret...

...By way of an unusual turn for Broadway, at least one of the marriages turns out successfully...

...Rebound caters a little more, in such matters as profanity and sophisticated wise-cracks, to the current Broadway idiom than Holiday...

...Hopkins was again the fortunate producer...

...It is a process of mental self-deception which is unfair to Miss Cornell herself...

...Barry agreed so emphatically with this verdict, that he deliberately wrote his next play for Miss Williams...

...Jackie Oakie was also excellent as the famous "Bilge" Smith...

...In the present instance, Miss Cornell is brittle and mannered in certain scenes, tears emotion to bits in others, and displays a singsong diction almost throughout, in which the beginning of each phrase is accented, while the end trails off into inaudibility...

...It is written by Margaret Ayer Barnes and Edward Sheldon, produced by Gilbert Miller, and used as a starring vehicle by Katharine Cornell...

...In its latest form, it offers many interesting examples of the new technique which is rapidly revolutionizing motion-picture entertainment...

...Once more Don Stewart, as in Holiday, appears in the role of the happily married mentor who guides his sister-in-law through the channels of the first year...

...It appeared for a time that something of the weird scenic effects of Porgy would be used to carry the rhythm-a distinct screen improvement over the stage version, in which alleged Chinese girls went through amazing acrobatics...

...There is no more natural actress on the New York stage, for the simple reason that Miss Williams never attempts to be much else than her natural self...

...And this time, by way of adding further amateur talent, Donald Ogden Stewart (in person) was inducted into the cast...

...To give but one instance, the famous Hallelujah chorus got off to a good start, and quite logically, as part of a Negro spiritualist meeting...

...There remains only the mystery of why the star permits her fine talents to be exploited in such fifth-rate claptrap...

...Things rarely happen so logically on modern Broadway...

...In Paris Bound, written by Philip Barry, Madge Kennedy was the star, but for a secondary part Mr...

...But it is essentially of one piece with that outstanding comedy in holding to a wise and occasionally dis-armingly deep philosophy of human relations...

...Even a first class talent can not long withstand the corrosion of theatrical rubbish...

...Here you have the quite unusual story of the genesis of Rebound, and of the delightful association of Hopkins, Stewart and Williams...

...Moreover, her own work is suffering in the process of reforming bad women characters against their will...

...She had comparatively little to do or say, but she did and said that much with such distinct individuality that critics and audiences were of one mind on the subject...

...Originally a play called Shore Leave, then a bright though routine musical comedy, and now a screen combination, Hit the Deck has run the gamut of possible dramatic treatments...

...At the Plymouth Theatre...

...The Screen Version of Hit the Deck STRANGER and less welcome things have happened than the transformation of this highly successful musical comedy into a screen operetta...

...We are also indebted to the screen for the chance to see and hear the delectable Polly Walker in this old favorite...

...She also does it, not as the only means of coming near enough to Jose Moreno's coffee cup, but because she actually craves his affection even while planning his murder...

...In the main, however, and in spite of these absurd concessions to stage convention, Hit the Deck comes far nearer to natural illusion on the screen than as a musical comedy...

...The main point is that you are more than ready to overlook such deficiencies, and to accept at its own considerable value a talent which relies on charming mannerism and ruggedly humorous sincerity...

...And-he will not be mistaken...

...At all events, many scenes in the present play have a distinct and not unwelcome resemblance to the tone and temper of Holiday-sequences of talk which are amusing chiefly because quite irrelevant, and a technique by which silent understanding is made to convey, as it should, much more than words...

...The producers take just enough advantage of their new liberty of action, scene and sequences to forecast brilliant possibilities when some director of genuine intelligence and imagination takes hold of such problems...

...Madeleine Cary is the sort of person who, planning to get rid of an inconvenient lover by arsenic, can and does spend amorous hours with him up to the moment of administering the fatal dose...

...At the Earl Carroll Theatre...

...He, in turn, was equally captivated by the Williams personality, and promptly turned playwright...

...It is Truesdale's broken engagement with Evie which starts the machinery going, and his later flirtations with Evie which nearly destroy Hope Williams's (beg pardon-Sara Jaffrey's) honeymoon...

...The rest is so poor that, with the least deliberate twist by the actors, it would become a huge satire...

...There are, in fact, moments when one fears mightily that Miss Williams's range will break down completely...

...She will probably always be cast in type...

...The play itself, even as Grand Guignol melodrama, is poorly written...

...She does this in spite of the fact that she is sincerely in love with a young English nobleman, whom she intends to marry...

...Settings, as usual, by Robert Edmond Jones, round out the production with rare perfection of atmosphere and detail...

...But of course a great deal of the similarity between the plays lies in the simple fact that both were written for Hope Williams, and to exploit the limited but very definite qualities which that young actress possesses...

...The broken-hearted lover remains broken hearted and unconsoled...

...A special word should also be said for the rarely subtle and delightful curtains to the first and second acts, the latter being reminiscent, though in a far different key, of the second-act climax of Burlesque-also a Hopkins production...