The Play and Screen

...It is one of those deliriously frantic pieces which I was not fortunate enough to see in itsearlier run a few years ago, but which I feel doubly fortunate in seeing now for the first time...

...Colbrook (if you happen to recall the play) was a widow who had come east with a very small financial stake, determined to pilot her seven children to successful careers...

...If any boy attempted to dress as this boy does in any college town of the United States, his life would be one long misery...

...The effort of the maiden aunt, Miss Colbrook, to take away the children, and the surprising way in which little Bill became the solution of all the troubles form the skeleton of the rather slender plot...

...The extraordinary thing about a play like The Tavern is that it gives you the illusion—as intended—of not being real...

...Two such characters never existed—which makes the reality of all the other situations a trifle hard to accept...

...The whole sum and substance of the magician's art is in making you love illusion just because you know it is only illusion...

...It even fits light fantasies such as Peter Pan...

...Minor details, perhaps, but no credit to Warner Brothers' producing staff...

...That is where the avowed magician differs from the occultist or the fakir...

...Will Rogers himself is as much of a caricature of the average American business man as Lumsden Hare, as Lord Worthing, is an amiable libel on British aristocracy...

...For this reason, the play falls rather between farce and comedy and is neither one nor the . other...

...This matter of "theatre"—or illusion—is one of the great mysteries which keeps the stage alive through the centuries...

...There would seem to be a large field here for authors of the calibre of George Kelly, specialists in the technique of the one-act play...

...There is the character of the Vagabond—the central, half-mad figure who sees all life as drama...

...You can say that theatrical illusion is the power to make an audience believe in the reality of what they see going on, to sink into and accept the stage situations, to forget grease-paint and costumes and memorized lines and to identify themselves with one or more of the characters on the stage...

...They depend to an amazing degree upon the limited power of the senses...

...Play-boy of all time—romancer—defender of forgotten illusions—that part of the spirit of man which will never be kept under lock and key, which wanders the road, which yields to the madness of the moon...

...He says to himself, "If I wanted to produce this particular illusion, how would I go about it...

...They must fill out the time of full entertainment at the first run theatres...

...At the Fulton Theatre...

...Such costumes are to be found only in musical comedy choruses...

...Do not gather the impression, however, that the piece is dull simply because it is obvious in general outline...

...Will Rogers has proved over a series of years that he is almost as good an actor as he is a wit...

...Shorts" are admittedly a problem...

...One loves it for its vagabondage, its ridiculous underscorings and exaggerations, and above all for its triumphant "theatre...

...It is a good thing for the languishing stage to have this revival of The Tavern...

...And as to the office of the Cambridge bank president—well, it would do credit to the smoothest oil stock promoter...

...You say to yourself, "There must be a trick in it," but you enjoy the illusion for its own sake, and all the more because you know it is a trick...

...It makes us see, in a flashing glance, how far too seriously we take the theatre—or else, if you prefer, how far too theatrically we take the serious...

...The Tavern, as a play, is distinctly the work of a magician, making you enjoy impossible nonsense just because it is impossible...

...So This Is London WILL ROGERS has a good time of it in a screen version of George M. Cohan's comedy on international prejudice...

...But that is a thin and wholly inadequate way of describing illusion...

...Cohan has a good cast for this revival—but it is his own performance that touches the real core of artistry, moving from the romantic swagger of the first scenes right through to that mad climax when he dances out into the storm, brandishing his crooked cane and chanting the song of man's everlasting freedom...

...The more you reject this with your intelligence, the more you enjoy the illusion of seeing the impossible accomplished before your eyes...

...And what a field for the dramatization of O. Henry...

...It partakes of magic precisely because it asks you at one and the same time to reject it with your intelligence and to accept it with your eyes and your emotions...

...It is a little hard, of course, to take the doings of all the characters seriously enough to make the romantic part of the story effective...

...The older son is supposed to be going to Harvard...

...It is one of those numerous stories built around the standard plot of the rich and uncouth American who believes that nothing good exists outside of the United States, and who suddenly finds himself projected into a foreign atmosphere...

...Then she tried bluff, but none too successfully...

...And just because it is magic and packed with the movement and life and thrill of the theatre, you accept it, welcome it, greet it with a rush of enthusiasm...

...You cannot define it exactly without belittling it, much as you cannot define the idea of the infinite...

...There was always a moment in the play when the foolish but courageous mother nearly lost sympathy through the effort to justify the illegitimate birth of her youngest son...

...Just because it is utterly preposterous—and meant to be so—it is the best example our stage has known in a decade of the power of illusion, standing stark and by itself...

...But that is no excuse for not doing them reasonably well...

...No other man could do this as Cohan does it, chiefly because no other man of our time has understood better, cherished more completely and lived more thoroughly the very magic we call theatre...

...After listening to every get-rich-quick scheme, she found her fortune gone and staggering debts facing her...

...It fits the normal play reasonably well...

...Courage THE play in which Janet Beecher spent many months on Broadway has been altered slightly in its film version— not, on the whole, to its disadvantage...

...This makes for a better alignment of values and obviates all need for false sentimentality...

...To be free on a night like this, in the storm"—the glorious gallantry of it...

...Not only because George M. Cohan plays this part, and to the hilt, but because of the part itself, the Vagabond stands for something eternal...

...Nothing in semi-slapstick comedy could be more delightful than Will Rogers's efforts to solve the mysteries of English hunting—nothing in serious mood more touching than his efforts to repair the damage he has done to his son's love affair...

...He can make even an absurd situation almost believable and when he does settle down to serious portrayal, he has not a little of the heart-pulling power of David Warfield...

...So does the audience for that matter—not only in listening to Rogers's dry comments, but in watching the romance of little Maureen O'Sullivan (last seen in John McCormack's film) as the daughter of an English lord...

...The screen catches the best values of the play, notably in the performance of little Leon Janney as Bill—a characterization quite as true and touching as the stage original...

...In the film version little Bill has no such stigma—except in the suspicious mind of his aunt...

...He refuses resolutely to accept the testimony of his senses, because he knows, from his own experience, that fooling the senses is a comparatively easy matter...

...The conjurer does not ask you or expect you to believe that he can make a dove out of thin air, or saw a living woman in two without killing her...

...At the Winter Garden...

...Nine times out of ten he succeeds...

...That is his theme...

...Even her children began to berate her—all, that is, except the devoted little Bill who became her champion against the entire world...

...In other words, the magician is an honest man by nature...

...The magician, on the other hand, starts out with the sceptical formula that anything out of keeping with common sense and cumulative human experience is impossible...

...Belle Bennett plays the role of the mother on the screen, admirably...

...I once heard a disciple of Houdini explain why it was that this master of tricks could expose "mediums" who had defied the closest observation of scientists...

...The story is supposed to be set in Cambridge, Massachusetts...

...It is a very human little comedy, full of those intimate touches which can make so much of the stuff of drama in a large family...

...The Problem of Shorts HOLLYWOOD also has some housecleaning to do in the matter of short numbers...

...But will no one ever arrive in Hollywood capable of demanding authenticity in details of American life...

...All about us are people who would make the stage a pulpit, or, if not that, then a medical laboratory, or a psychological clinic or a sociological blunderbuss, or simply a place to tell dirty stories with forced wit...

...It creates, not the illusion of a recognized or even an imaginary reality, but the illusion of the utterly absurds-madness thrown into the pot of magic and brought forth as so many rabbits with pink tails and blue ears...

...His son, of course, has to fall in love with an English girl, with the result that we have Abie's Irish Rose all over again on an international scale...

...But it falls desperately short of fitting the antics of clowns, the grotesque humor of a Chaplin, or the broad blows and sharp thrusts of obvious satire...

...After all, this is the essence of the magician's art...

...Most of the shorts I have seen in recent weeks are not even up to the level of custard-pie comics...

...Scientists, he explained, start with observation, and try to find an explanation of observed facts...

...Before long, he has constructed a trick to accomplish the illusion, and with this as a clew, proceeds to find a way for exposing the trick...

...He looks instead for a trick...

...How few there are to be content with it as a place for magic, nonsense, improvisation and sheer mental adventure—for Harlequin and his crew and the reign of topsyturvy...

...The comedy is just the kind you would expect from such a setting...

...Of course there is something more to The Tavern than magical nonsense and satirical melodrama...

...At the Roxy Theatre...

...He enjoys proving to you the limitation of your own senses, June 4, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL 135 but he does not seek to debauch your intelligence...