The Play and Screen

...Harris has dubbed the play a "new comedy," although he knows, as well as the audiences packing his theatre, and should know a lot better, that it is sheer farce...

...The tiny and fragile Nell O'Day—recalled, perhaps, for her part in Paul Whiteman's screen review, King of Jazz —makes an eminently successful stage debut, including a startlingly brilliant bit of "throw around" dancing with the Tommy Atkins Sextet...

...Stewart's libretto that you find in any Gilbert and Sullivan work...

...H. W. H...

...Later, she tells him the truth—that she loves him, but that her duty is with her husband, and that WoodL/s task, henceforth, is to make a man of himself and to build his future on the lesson of their mistake...

...But this is in all half-light, made subsidiary to the flashes of an uproarious farce whooping its way successfully through three acts and seven scenes...

...The lighting is flat and uninteresting, and many of the pictures are taken at angles which produce unhappy foreshortening—as in one scene in which Laura Simmons appears on a scale nearly a third larger than Woodley, who is seated behind and to one side of her...

...The acting is equally simple...

...It must also be a surprise to the smut-mongers of Broadway that a show of this sort can win its way to instant and widely heralded success without resort either to nude displays or to filthy jokes and implications...

...The ladies of that same aggregation are pleasing and individual and greatly assisted by an excellent group of Abbott dancers, who can tap dance on their toes with inexhaustible ease...

...The trouble with most musical comedies (as one recognizes after seeing Fine and Dandy) lies in the seriousness of routine approach...

...There is a moment when the schoolmaster's wife, Laura Simmons, nearly wrecks Woodley's life through trying to correct her mistake in the wrong way...

...The same quiet unconcern about probabilities pervades Mr...

...The resemblance comes through ability to project a personality without the least obvious effort...

...The best part of the British film is its adherence to simple and homely details of setting and costuming...

...But I have always felt that in contrast to the way Ibsen would handle a similar situation, or to the way Shaw does handle a similar problem in Candida, Van Druten has clearly pointed the result of facing an issue bravely and with a clear sense of duties and responsibilities...

...Once in a Lifetime OFFERED up to the gods of laughter on the stage of the Music Box, this play has already proved itself welcome in their eyes...

...That rapid tempo, so admirably sustained throughout those kaleidescopic and innumerable scenes—even the half-dozen doors in the studio set, kept in perpetual motion during all the second act (vive la France, if for no other reason than discovering the importance of active doors to farce...

...His impersonation of the weary playwright, driven to nervous prostration through months of waiting on the imperial wishes of the czar of Hollywood, is whimsically delightful...

...Miss O'Day has an adequate voice, a demure manner and surprising agility as a dancer...

...The truth is that Mr...

...Two-thirds of it is a vehicle for Joe Cook—probably the most versatile entertainer on the stage— and the rest is an outlet for the irrepressible Donald Ogden Stewart, who wrote the book and, in so doing, showed what wonders can happen when real intelligence and wit are applied to the business of being plausibly silly...

...Those who require something more solid than the excellent farcical qualities offered in this play will also find in it a love story, to which the acting of Jean Dixon brings the same depth and seriousness that characterized her performance in June Moon...

...Besides this group of major entertainers, there are innumerable character bits, such as the old man who eats his sandwich, injected for no reason whatsoever, and for that very reason absurdly funny...

...It would be ungracious, however, to quarrel with Mr...

...The stranded vaudeville trio of fairly standard type—one of whom, painted perhaps with brush a trifle too broad, is the goodnatured "sap" dear to all audiences...

...belong only to farce—to say nothing of the lines, many of which are slapstick and almost Rabelaisian in character...

...Whether as juggler, acrobat, dancer or grinning comedian, he is the nearest approach we have to a oneman show...

...The male chorus is supplemented by a few men of age and portly build who contribute unexpectedly to the comedy and vastly relieve what is usually the strain of watching "gentlemen of the ensemble...

...In many years of theatre going, during which poor plays and stupid plays have far outnumbered good ones, and during which, especially, inane and routine musical comedies have vastly outnumbered even the reasonably entertaining ones, I cannot recall a production with more vivacity, pleasant nonsense, clean fun and lightly tripping music than Fine and Dandy...

...Fine and Dandy verges only once—and that in a brief "before the curtain" interlude—on this trite ground...

...As to the matter of the play itself, everything depends on your reading of the final turn given to this problem of adolescent love...

...The whole affair is carried off with that high exaggeration and solemn absurdity which is only amusing when it is intended...

...Cook is a perpetual nonsensical moment...

...Kaufman, not content merely to collaborate in the writing of Once in a Lifetime, and to stage it, manages to act in it as well...

...The program states "many nonsensical moments created by Joe Cook...

...Donald Ogden Stewart is incapable of taking himself or his work that seriously...

...Harris over the niceties of definition when he has given us such a thoroughly refreshing production...

...Wit and satire join hands with slapstick with exhilarating results...

...Satire, it is true, abounds, but it is laid on with a heavy hand, and is hung rather on the tricks of direction, costuming and staging, than on any inherent subtlety in the lines...

...She tries to make him think she has merely been flirting with him, and that he must forget her entirely...

...It has just enough of everything never to grow tiresome or lopsided...

...Yet, as I say, Fine and Dandy manages easily to be more than a Joe Cook vehicle...

...By and large, it is probably the cleanest show of its kind in recent years...

...Let me make it clear that intelligence and a delicious sense of the unexpected and incongruous have been applied to every part of this undertaking...

...At the Music Box Theatre...

...An excellent mechanical ballet is engineered by Eugene Von Grona, and Charles Le Maire's costumes very happily combine brilliancy and grace...

...Here are personalities not unfamiliar to the drama we have known in recent years...

...Fortunately the producing combination—Morris Green and Lewis E. Gensler—enter into this spirit in every supporting detail, and Joe Cook's many improvisations are all in the same mood...

...Young Woodley THE chief interest in this screen version of John Van Druten's much discussed play of three seasons back lies in the fact that it is an entirely British-produced film—one of a series to be presented by the Elstree Productions of London at the George M. Cohan Theatre...

...Broadway now has its happy chance to even up an old score with its ancient enemy, the cinema, and to prod it nicely...

...Woodley's brave acceptance of this task turns him at the end of the play, and very obviously, on the path to manhood...

...One gathers that the book writers take themselves very seriously—attempting to combine the routine plot, with its sobbing first-act curtain, and comedy relief in the form of one or two professional comedians...

...It is thus a happy combination of viewpoints and abilities that brings this jamboree of nonsense to surprising importance as a standard of sheer entertainment...

...The more brainlessly he behaves, the more radiantly fortune smiles upon him...

...It is unfortunate that the quiet good taste of the British producers and actors cannot be combined with the far greater technical excellence in photography and lighting of the Hollywood masters...

...It is all for one and on;, for all...

...The gifted Mr...

...The switching of close-ups is also awkwardly managed, and frequently results in breaking the feeling of continuous action...

...You are not asked to share any illusions of love or sorrow with the heroine...

...I THE PLAY AND SCREEN By RICHARD DANA SKINNER Fine and Dandy T IS never so easy to discover "what is wrong with the theatre" as when you strike an example of what is at least 90 percent right with the theatre...

...But the photography and the direction are distinctly inferior...

...Moreover, the attachment between Woodley and Laura Simmons is never permitted to go beyond one moment of revelation over an English tea-table...

...Much of the criticism aroused by the play paid too much attention to the problem and far too little to the author's brave and clear-minded solution...

...It thus affords, with its successors to come, a means of comparing the technique of British with Hollywood producers...

...The union would effect a very real advance in the new medium of the talking screen...

...Eleanor Powell, who frequently "stops the show," has certain qualities in addition to looks and sprightliness which remind one, for no traceable reason, of Gertrude Lawrence...

...The wholly unusual settings, including the mechanical background of a drop forging plant, have been designed by Henry Dreyfus...

...At Erlanger's Theatre...

...The authors, Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, have prepared a delicious tribute, and the high-priest, Sam Harris, has spared nothing, not even ermine coats, in the splendor (albeit of the garish variety native to Hollywood) of its presentation...

...The movies are delicious satirical meat, which the authors have served up most humorously—even if the meal drags a bit at the end...

...You begin to suspect quite illogical nonsense from the first two minutes on, and that is exactly what you get...

...They are not the least alike in feature nor in type of work...

...In Once in a Lifetime the laugh is on the movies...

...Joe Wagstaff has a bit of the same quality as a juvenile, and John Ehrle's voice more than makes up for the thankless part assigned to him...

...The rooms and the clothes of all concerned have the well-worn and sedately shabby appearance which gives authentic atmosphere...

...It is hardly pleasant to watch the sufferings of Woodley—a senior of eighteen at an English public school— as a result of his poetic infatuation for the young wife of his pompous headmaster...

...The principals, too, are as well and carefully chosen as if the producers knew nothing of Joe Cook's single-handed prowess...

...One may dislike the whole subjectmatter, but the author's viewpoint is constructive...

...At the George M. Cohan Theatre...

...The movie queen's inelegant voice is only funny because she wears such elegant clothing, and because her retinue is so elegantly liveried...