Reunion in Hollywood

(See front cover)

When a celebrated actor chooses a vehicle, he is likely to pick something insignificant, to be sure that the merits of his performance outweigh the rest of the entertainment. When two celebrated actors select a vehicle, they are likely to have a hard time finding one which will suit this requirement for both of them. Arsene Lupin (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) can therefore be considered a triumph of selection and adaptation. It gives both Barrymore brothers, Lionel and John, parts of almost equal importance and allows each to perform his specialty without stealing the play from the other. Lionel is Guerchard. a growling, hobbling, blinking chief of detectives whose duty it is to snare an amazingly subtle thief named Arsene Lupin. Asked how he proposes to do it, Lionel Barrymore snarls: ''Oh, I'll stumble around, growl a little, limp a little bit." It is a very convincing speech, because this is what Lionel Barrymore has been doing in the cinema for 15 years.

John Barrymore is a very different sort of buck. He raises one eyebrow, wears a white tie, jokes politely with a lady (Karen Morley) whom he finds naked in his bed, and carries the proud name of the Duke of Charmerace. Guerchard rather suspects, when the picture begins, that the Duke of Charmerace is Arsene Lupin. However, when he goes to a ball at the Charmerace establishment in Paris, he finds that Charmerace suspects him of the same thing. Moreover, his likeliest spy, after climbing into the Charmerace bed without her clothes, not only makes friends with Charmerace but falls in love with him. This causes Lionel Barrymore to grunt, rub his chin with one hand, make his eyes pop. It does not prevent Arsene Lupin from helping himself to bonds, jewels and expensive pictures. Presently Lupin's signed depredations occur at the suburban chateau of one Gourney-Martin, where Charmerace also happens to be staying. After this he steals the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, a misdemeanor which causes his identity to be revealed.

Anyone who pays 25-c- to see the plot of Arsene Lupin, derived from the play by Maurice Le Blanc and Francis de Croisset, or to hear the dialog written for it by Bayard Veiller and Lenore Coffee, would have a right to feel disappointed, if not duped. But no one should make such a mistake. The pleasure of seeing this Arsene Lupin consists entirely in seeing both Barrymore brothers at the same time. Theatre-goers enjoyed this privilege in 1919, when both were cabined in the narrow dungeons of The Jest, but they are not likely to enjoy it again. Lionel Barrymore began to be a cinemactor 22 years ago in Friends, John later in Nearly a King. They have been cinemactors exclusively since 1925. The appearance of both in the same picture last week indicated that it is now merely sentimental to regard the Barrymores as the royal family of the stage and it italicized the dispute about whether, histrionically, the cinema is a more important medium than the theatre.

Graced with the best profile and sharpest tongue in the Barrymore family, John has been vastly more publicized than his brother. He is now an actor so celebrated that everyone is familiar with the legends of his scapegrace youth:

P: He decided to become an artist and took one lesson at the Art Students' League, to the surprise of his father, Maurice Barrymore, who considered that in taking any lessons at all he had displayed unprecedented diligence.

P:Arthur Brisbane discharged him for incompetence.

P:He and a friend were accustomed to drinking up the proceeds of pawning the friend's gold tooth.

P: His uncle, John Drew, on learning that young Barrymore had been drafted for relief work after the earthquake, said: "It took a convulsion of nature to get him up and the U. S. Army to put him to work."

P: He finally made his debut, eating a red apple in the family tradition, at a Chicago performance of Magda. Comfortably settled now in Hollywood, John Barrymore is supposed to have worn the same felt hat since the day he arrived. He speaks of the cinema and its moguls with witty contempt but sees to it that, when feasible, he is photographed from the left side, and shown, at one moment or another, puffing on a pipe. Gossipmongers, picturing him as an eccentric, are delighted by the fact that he has the only privately owned dinosaur's egg in the U. S.; that his wife (Dolores Costello) calls him "Winkie"; that he maintains a large aviary in which his favorite is an ugly vulture named Maloney. Once, when Ethel Barrymore was engaged to an English army officer named Graham, Finley Peter Dunne suggested a way for the couple to work out a budget: "Jack and Lionel will support them on the money that Ethel gives to Jack and Lionel." John Barrymore now has a yacht, the Infanta. His pennant is a king snake wearing a crown. Last week he was injured slightly in a motor accident.

No better, perhaps, at the tricks of their trade than many of their confreres, the prestige of the contemporary Barrymores rests upon one trait which they have in common: a magnificent stage presence which they inherit from their father, the late Maurice Barrymore, who was born Herbert Blythe and took his stage name from an Irish peer who was one of his ancestors. Where John Barrymore is elegant, faintly satiric and irrepressibly nonchalant, his brother is curt, surly, emphatic. At 53 (three years older than John), Lionel usually plays the roles of elderly but vigorous personages. He exercises his prerogative of giving most of them the same mannerisms and is at his best when chuckling, gnashing, and gesticulating to express intoxication.

Lionel Barrymore's success in cinema has recently been more marked than that of his brother but he is not now, nor has he ever been, equipped with that peculiar glitter that surrounds his brother. The fact that Lionel's nose is too blunt for any critic to have described him as "an elegant paper cutter moving through the drama" may somewhat account for this. He is neither a dope-fiend nor a drunkard; he seldom abuses critics in print and he made his stage debut at 15. Like his brother, he later tried to be a painter. Then he took to the piano and became a competent composer. He sips three malted milks a day, drives a Ford roadster, and merely says "My God!" when irritated. Two years ago he decided to stop acting and become a director. He made five or six pictures, including the successful Madame X, before he was tempted by the fat, bibulous part of Stephen Ashe in A Free Soul.

While Arsene Lupin was being made, Hollywood heard that the Barrymores were squabbling on the set, trying hard to steal each other's scenes. This was probably unfounded. Amiable competitors, they first played together in Peter Ibbetson. John, offered the role, refused it as "sentimental bunk" until he learned that there was a part in it for Lionel, then an illustrator at $50 a week. The play ran four months. Later, planning a fishing trip together, they expected it to be postponed a week or two by The Jest, which ran nine months. When they met for the first time in weeks to start work on Arsene Lupin, John, wearing an unbuttoned shirt with no cravat, arrived late and found Lionel waiting. Said he: ''How are you, my good man?" Said Lionel: "I like your necktie." Presently they will perform together in Grand Hotel, John as the Baron, Lionel as Kringelein.

While the Barrymore tradition in the cinema may be perpetuated by Dolores Ethel Mae Barrymore. infant daughter of John, it is even more likely to be continued by the grown sons (Samuel Pomeroy Colt, 22, John Drew Colt, 18) and daughter (Ethel Barrymore Colt, 19) of Sister Ethel Barrymore. John Colt made his debut last year in Scarlet Sister Mary. His sister, wearing blackface, performed in the same play and was this season deluded by the mercenary assurances of George White into joining the cast of his Scandals. This year Ethel Barrymore has been touring the Midwest, to comparatively small advantage. If there was any doubt as to where all Barrymores belong at present, it was dispelled when she announced last week that she intended, when her road tour ends in June, to perform in talking cinema for the first time with both her brothers in the supporting cast.

*John Drew Colt, Ethel Barrymore Colt. Missing: Samuel Pomeroy Colt, now in Hollywood seeking his start.

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