Joy v. Monopoly

Last week Joseph Michael Schenck, president of United Artists, said his company would not let its pictures appear in Fox theatres anywhere in the country. His accusation: that the Fox West Coast chain of 400 theatres was trying to establish a monopoly. His reason: Fox West Coast Theatres were refusing to pay what United Artists thought their pictures were worth.* His proposed plan of combat: building United Artists Theatres in 18 cities and meanwhile exhibiting the company's product in armories and tents if necessary. Possible result: temporary boycotting of Fox theatres, if other companies share Mr. Schenck's conviction that a monopoly has been established.

Said United Artist Schenck:

"We make pictures for the joy of doing. It is not work, it is pleasure, it is joy. We do not say to ourselves 'Now we will spend so much on a moving picture.' We say, 'We will make the best that is in us. We will dream over it, we will toil over it, and if we put our hearts into it we will make something that will entertain and inspire the American public.' "

Year's Best

Last week at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, Will H. Hays read the annual awards of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences:

Best male acting--George Arliss (Disraeli).

Best female acting--Norma Shearer (Divorcee).

Best directing--Lewis Milestone (All Quiet on the Western Front).

Best production of the year--All Quiet on the Western Front (Universal).

Best writing--Frances Marion (The Big House).

Best art directing--Herman Gosse (The King of Jazz).

Best sound recording--The Big House (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer ).

Best cinematography--Willard Van der Veer and Joseph T. Rucker (With Byrd at the South Pole).

The New Pictures

Check and Double Check (RKO). Knowing that the cinema audience is to a large extent the radio audience of the U. S., the producers of any effort whose cast included Amos (Freeman F. Gosden) and Andy (Charles J. Correll) could be certain of attention at the box office. But material like this could command nothing but the very mildest attention if the radio audience were not the cinema audience. The explanation of the success of the blackface pair in broadcast is that they have created a fiction just funny enough to make people want to hear its nightly continuation and not long enough to let them become bored. Served in a lump, the Gosden-Correll humor is less digestible. Amos & Andy stall their cab on Broadway, carry on business as usual in the barnlike headquarters of the Fresh Air Taxi Company in uptown Manhattan. They go to a meeting of the Mystic Order of the Knights of the Sea, talk to Madame Queen on the telephone, mispronounce words of four or more syllables by the formula of substituting "re" for "dis" as in "regusted," and "ul" for "or" as in "incorpulated." The story deals with a party to which Duke Ellington's orchestra, of Harlem's famed Cotton Club, are driven in the Fresh Air Taxi, and with the deed to some southern property. It must have been hard to make up and it is wearily told. Typical shot: Amos & Andy in the haunted house.

Reno (Sono Art-World Wide Pictures Inc.). A novel by Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. which was partly a lecture on Reno in travelog manner and partly a triangle lovestory is used here as the basis for the first picture Ruth Roland has made in years. She is the wife of a businessman who, faithless and cruel, tries to thwart her divorce. He accuses her of intimacy with a former suitor whom she met by accident on the train. A little child is involved in the suit, and this secures the sure laugh that children's voices get on the microphone and also gives Miss Roland a chance to sing a lullaby. She talks, too, in a manner emphatically refined, and finally finds a way of escaping from troubles quite as turbid as those which, in her famous oldtime serials, she eluded in the last reel by jumping her horse over a canyon. Silliest shot: a description of Reno, enunciated by an off stage voice and synchronized into the shot of the train.

Ruth Roland is one of the few active survivors of the cinema's early group of stars. Like-Alice Joyce and Irene Rich she has kept up her vitality and good looks. She was a headliner on the Keith Circuit when she was five, nearly 40 years ago. She went to high school for two years between road-shows. Since the days of her thrillers (Ruth of the Rockies, The Timber Queen, Ruth of the Range, The Tiger's Trail), one of which she wrote and directed herself (The Adventures of Ruth), she has been out of pictures. She built up a real estate business in Los Angeles and made several million dollars, one million of which--as a grand gesture rare in life but common to the rich heroines in the tradition she knows--she announced she was settling on Ben Bard when she married him in 1929.

A Lady's Morals (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). This unimportant little picture has its principal appeal in the fact that it is supposed to be based on the life of Jenny Lind, "Swedish Nightingale" of the Victorian Opera stage. Its best shots are the few that are definitely part of her history--the scenes at Castle Garden, and P. T. Barnum showing Miss Lind U. S. ballyhoo. Its main fault is that it sketches an amorous interlude in the life of a singer who was a notorious prig. Grace Moore, onetime musicomedy star, Metropolitan soprano, sings nicely and acts adequately.

Playboy of Paris (Paramount). Maurice Chevalier works busily at this loose-jointed comedy which fulfills fairly adequately the purpose for which it was obviously devised--that of giving him moments for informal songs and for his characteristic attitudes. It tells about a waiter in a little Paris cafe who makes love to all the women customers and becomes the centre of much Gallic plotting when he inherits a million francs. One song, "It's a Great Life If You Don't Weaken" has a chance of being a hit. For the rest, Playboy of Paris is notable chiefly for the expert clowning of Stuart Erwin and some clever detail, such as Waiter Chevalier's constant desire to wear his dress-up, braided waiter's coat instead of his everyday one--an impulse contested by his employer because of the cost of dry-cleaning. Best shot: a duel, in which the chef and bus boy of the cafe act as Chevalier's seconds.

Du Barry--Woman of Passion (United Artists). This is based on the play that David Belasco wrote for Mrs. Leslie Carter in 1901 and in spite of its elaborate modern photography it invokes the red plush and gaslight of a lost epoch in the theatre. When Mrs. Carter played the scene in which, forced by a cruel King of France to ridicule her lover, she finds that her will has failed her and she sinks into his arms--when she uttered vibrantly the rolling rococo dialog, audiences sniffed for a while and then went wild with enthusiasm. There is still dramatic momentum in the play, but the modern theatre has lost its feeling for that kind of thing. Norma Talmadge plays less pompously than might be expected, but people who liked her program pictures in the old days may hope that this will be the last attempt to establish her as a great figure in sound pictures. However, her diction is improving; in her first dialog effort she talked like an elocution pupil; this time she talks like an elocution teacher. Silliest element: frequent use of closeups, even for the mob scenes and the fete in the King's garden.

*United Artists include: Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin, Eddie Cantor, Norma Talmadge.

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