Again Arbuckle?

Ten years ago, famed Funnyman Roscoe Conkling ("Fatty'') Arbuckle was tried for manslaughter after being found in a rumpled hotel room with the corpse of an obscure cinemactress named Virginia Rappe. He was acquitted. But, because many suspicious persons thought he might have caused the death of Cinemactress Rappe by attacking her, perhaps with a beer bottle, no cinema producers dared antagonize their audiences by hiring Funnyman Arbuckle. Funnyman Arbuckle tried a vaudeville tour, a Hollywood nightclub. When the nightclub failed, he got a job writing "gags" for Mack Sennett, has more recently, as "William Goodrich," been an assistant director for Educational Film Exchanges.

Last March Photoplay (monthly) printed an article about Funnyman Arbuckle called "Just Let Me Work," quoted the chief Arbuckle ambition: "I want to go back to the screen. I think I can entertain and gladden the people. . . ." Editor James R. Quirk of Photoplay gave a radio talk, asked his listeners whether they thought Funnyman Arbuckle should be permitted to return to the screen under his own name. Last week, in the July Photoplay James R. Quirk gave the answer. He had received 3,000 letters from people who thought Arbuckle should be permitted to resume cinemacting; among the letter-writers were the foreman of the first Arbuckle jury and San Francisco District Attorney Matthew Brady who prosecuted him.

A few people did not want Fatty Arbuckle to return. One was Canon William Sheafe Chase, who said: "I have no personal animosity toward this man but think it very unwise to have him at this time to what I consider a very im nity." portant Wrote moral Editor influence Quirk: in the "No one commu accused Arbuckle of making a picture wasn't clean."

The New Pictures

Smart Money (Warner Brothers) is a fast, factual and exciting cinema about a Greek gambler named, after several real ones, Nick.* He gets started in a small-town barber shop, running a poker game on the side. His customers so respect his poker playing that they stake him for a big-town game. Ingenuous Nick gets cheated on his first excursion; the next time he gets punched in the face. The third time he wins, and afterward uses a big-town barber shop as a blind for his elaborate gambling house. Especially fond of blondes, he pats a manicurist's leg and asks her for advice, keeps a blonde canary in a cage. He warms up his luck by rubbing a blackamoor's head, a hunchback's shoulder, the lapels of his own loud clothing. When the police send a lady to get evidence on his gambling-house, Nick gives her a drink, then kicks her from behind. The picture grows a little less lively toward the end. Knowing that Nick trusts all blondes, the police use one to trap him. Nick is last seen on the platform of a train, with an overcoat over his handcuffed wrists, offering two to one that he will be out in five years.

In the effort to vary, however slightly, the frayed formula for underworld pictures, Warner Brothers stumbled into the environment of illegal gambling, a field so fertile it is hard to see how it had hitherto been neglected. Nick is played by Edward G. Robinson, an actor with the face of a depraved cherub and a voice which makes everything he says seem violently profane. In Smart Money he does again several of the things he did in Little Caesar but not so many that the role is repetitious. His pal, who dies after Nick has hit him for suggesting that his last bad blonde is a stoolpigeon, is James Cagney (Public Enemy).

The Viking (Varick Frissell Production) is the picture about seal hunting which the late Varick Frissell, Yale '26, nephew of Pennsylvania's Governor Pinchot, was finishing when his ship blew up off White Bay, Newfoundland, killing him and 25 others (TIME, March 23). It tells a feeble love story about two sealers, one a braggart, the other a "jinker" (unlucky sealer), both attached to the same girl. But interesting and important is the middle part of the picture where the love story is practically forgotten and there is shown a journalistic record of a perilous and picturesque method of earning a livelihood. Producer Frissell secured an old-time sealing boat, the Viking, and the services of Captain Bob Bartlett, who skippered Admiral Peary to the Pole and has since realized handsomely on the exploit, to sail it. Better still, he secured a cast of 250 Newfoundland "swilers," photographed them honestly engaged in a real seal-hunt.

Episodes in the seal-hunt have that intimate realism which the cinema alone can give such a subject. The Viking grinds through ice sometimes so thick that it has to be dynamited. When a radio report reveals a seal herd 20 miles away, the swilers debark and scramble over 20 miles of broken ice to find them. The hunt itself --the men deploying to stalk the seals, killing them with shotguns--is ably but too briefly photographed. Tragic is the situation of one squeaking white baby seal, stuck to a lump of ice; when his mother pauses to nose him off, both are shot. After the hunt, the sealers haul their "sculps" (seal skins) back across the ice. The jinker and his rival get left behind in a blizzard, the story sets in again.

Much of the excitement which Producer Frissell felt about seal-hunting survives in his picture (he was going to call it White Thunder) and saves it both from the apathy of newsreels and from the pretentiousness of most commercialized films intended to be exotic. Best shot in The Viking is an iceberg with waves breaking against it. Producer Frissell wanted also to make a shot of an iceberg turning over and had gone back to Labrador to try to get one when the Viking blew up. Before The Viking's Manhattan premiere last week, Dr. and Mrs. Lewis Fox Frissell gave a dinner to Governor and Mrs. Pinchot; their other son, Phelps Montgomery Frissell, was killed eight years ago while climbing in the Alps.

Confessions of a Co-ed (Paramount) is an excessively stupid little production which serves no apparent purpose except to belittle the talents of Cinemactress Sylvia Sidney who is featured in it. She appears as a college student bedazzled by a classmate (Phillips Holmes) whose toothy smiles will seem to audiences less seductive than benign. When he seduces and deserts her, she marries his roommate in a puzzled state of mind. She is still puzzled when her seducer reappears, three years after graduation. He is still smiling vaguely, but his intentions have improved. They love each other and will act accordingly.

Cinema audiences stopped believing that all college students were morons several years ago and Confessions of a Co-ed will therefore seem implausible as well as dull. Its dialog, anonymously contributed, is comparable to Mother Goose without rhymes and its campus mise-en-scene suggests the cloisters of a day nursery for retarded adolescents. If anyone can take any interest at all in Confessions of a Coed, it will be because Sylvia Sidney almost manages to make real emotions out of fake situations. One of the many young actresses who have effected a successful transfer from the stage to talkies, she replaced Clara Bow in City Streets when the Daisy de Boe scandal and Cinemactress Bow's indispositions made the substitution necessary. She is now being groomed, though inefficiently, to be a star.

Born in The Bronx, she left school to go on the stage, stole the play when, in Crime, she sat on a park bench and said "Squeeze me" to boy friends. She has her make-up prescribed for her by a chemist; other kinds poison her. Scarcely five feet tall, she loathes outdoor exercise, has a quick temper and five nicknames (Slivick, Monkey, Goofy, Brat, Funny Face). She speaks Yiddish, wears no underclothes, cannot eat eggs, can twist her right wrist so that it cracks, likes to go to Bellevue Hospital to hear lectures on psychology.

* The two most celebrated real ones: the late Nick Forzelli, son of a Syrian hop-seller, who once bet $327,000 on a horse to win, was reputed to have won and lost $1,000,000 three times in his career; Nick ("The Greek") Dandolas, craps, lowball and faro player, friend of Jack Dempsey.

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