The New Pictures

Once in a Lifetime (Universal). When Universal bought their play from Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, the authors had every reason to expect that it would be changed considerably in being adapted for the cinema, which they had roundly flayed. Instead, Universal was clever enough to throw a few pebbles at its own glass house. Like the play, the picture chuckles at Hollywood for its illiteracy and vanity. Only the fact that Once in a Lifetime was made there withdraws some of the sting from its satire and makes it more farce than castigation.

The story of three vaudevillains who wander into the Glogauer Studios and persuade Herman Glogauer to let them teach his actors elocution, remains essentially unchanged. The vaudevillains fail in their endeavor but one of them is rewarded, for unprecedented impertinence to his employer, by being put in complete charge of all Glogauer productions. He (Jack Oakie) distinguishes himself by making a picture, which turns out to be a hit, from the wrong script; by buying 2,000 airplanes so that he can get one free. If Once in a Lifetime is less funny because less angry than it was upon the stage, it is just as appropriately cast. Aline MacMahon, in the role which got her a Hollywood contract two years ago, is the cleverest of the three vaudevillains. The incredibly stupid receptionist in the studio lobby is Zasu Pitts. While making vague enquiries about the name of an author who has been waiting to see Mr. Glogauer for four months, she utters genteel moans so sad that they are almost yodels.

Night After Night (Paramount) is the Grand Hotel of the speakeasy industry, a glib, neatly put together formula-picture illustrating the hypothesis that true love chuckles at grilled doors. The proprietor of the speakeasy in this picture is no common Tony; he is Joe Anton (George Raft) and his blind-tiger is as elegant as his double-breasted dinner coat. When Joe Anton observes a fetching gilded youngster propping her face against his champagne glasses, he wonders who she is. He learns that she is a Miss Healy (Constance Cummings) and that the saloon which she patronizes, out of nostalgia, was once her private residence. The elocutionist (Alison Skipworth) whom Anton hires to teach him polite diction gets drunk with a blonde beautician (Mae West), while Joe makes love to Miss Healy. Competing 'leggers try to buy his establishment and one of his old friends (Wynne Gibson) tries to re-open their relations with a revolver. What all this leads to any cinemaddict ought to know, but Raft and Cummings look their parts and the picture was well directed by Archie Mayo. It manages to convey a sense of a locale, to dramatize successfully the popular conception of speakeasies as venal institutions which are sleek, disorderly and exciting.

Washington Merry-Go-Round (Columbia). Cinemaddicts who read Washington Merry-Go-Round last year should not make the mistake of supposing that the cinema dramatizes the anonymous gossip book. Columbia bought the title, assigned Maxwell Anderson to write a story that would fit it. The result is a crusading cinema in the new manner, a realistic exhibition of unreal foibles in the U. S. Government. It shows Lee Tracy as an honest Congressman named Button Gwinnett Brown, addicted to puppyish declamations against pork-barrel chicanery and embattled against a smooth-tongued political boss named Norton (Allan Dinehart).

What prevents Washington Merry-Go-Round from being an effective crusade as well as an entertaining picture is the fact that Bogeyman Norton, who is supposed to exemplify the weaknesses of representative government, is a straw villain combining the worst traits of Al Capone and Mussolini, whose career he hopes to emulate. He is a bootlegger as well as a boss. He cheats a kindly Senator (Walter Connolly) and then proposes to his charming daughter (Constance Cummings). One thing that Washington Merry-Go-Round does dramatize effectively is the Bonus Army. Congressman Brown visits Anacostia Flats on his first day in the Capital, rebukes its denizens for greed. Later he enlists several of them in a plot to secure evidence against Bogeyman Norton. When the plot has succeeded, he takes Norton to a Bonus Army tent, leaves him there alone with a loaded revolver. Good shot: Congressman Brown denouncing in his maiden speech a dishonest project to build a memorial to an unworthy general of the Indian wars.

Constance Cummings is 22, 5 ft. 4 in., 117 lb., with blue eyes, brown hair, freckles, a drawing-room voice. This means that she resembles most other young actresses in Hollywood, except that she has a good chance soon to be a star and has conquered three major obstacles on the way. Daughter of a Seattle lawyer named Halverstadt, she wasted no time changing her name. When Samuel Goldwyn selected her to play opposite Ronald Colman in Devil to Pay and then changed his mind, she was lucky enough to get a job with Columbia and her first bit, in The Criminal Code, got her a five-year contract. Last year she was selected, by a conglomeration of Hollywood pressagents, to be a "Baby Wampus Star."

Like most current Hollywood finds, Actress Cummings reached Hollywood via the Manhattan stage, where she was a dancer in the first Little Show and Linda Watkins' understudy in June Moon. She learned to act by practicing in front of a mirror. One of the busiest novices in Hollywood, Constance Cummings appears in six current pictures: Night After Night, Washington Merry-Go-Round, Movie Crazy, Attorney for the Defense, The Big Timer, Behind the Mask.

Three on a Match (Warner) possesses the ingenuity which cinemaddicts have come to expect from Authors Kubec Glasmon and John Bright, but it lacks the conviction which was in their previous pictures (The Public Enemy, Smart Money, Blonde Crazy). Its story of three girls who go to school together and meet for lunch years later when one has graduated from an institution of reform, one from a seminary and one from a college for typists, is somehow a little too pat to carry much weight. Even when Glasmon & Bright get down to the type of thing that has been their specialty--gangster talk and a good lively kidnapping-- they sound more like their imitators than themselves. This is when the rich girl (Ann Dvorak) has divorced her husband (Warren William) to take up with a racketeer, and the divorced husband has married the girl from the reform school (Joan Blondell). The racketeer steals from its governess (Bette Davis) his mistress's small son. This sets the stage for a climax with the police sirens that belong in every Glasmon-Bright production and for a suicide which is more implausible than tragic.

The Old Dark House (Universal). The British are a chipper, extraverted people, given to good table manners, "God Save the King" and gobbling up puddings such as "bubble & squeak." This is what most people suppose. It is therefore sad to find that the most disastrous and morbid fantasy which has come gibbering out of Hollywood this year, an angry mechanical wraith to scare children and terrify their elders, is essentially a British cinema. Its author is the jolly and companionable John Boynton Priestley, whose works are to be found in every drawing room which calls itself a parlor; its adapter is the glib Benn Levy, who usually specializes in Mayfair comedy; its dialogist is R. C. Sherriff, hitherto noted for his Journey's End. Its director is James Whale and its cast includes three of the ablest British actors who have so far emigrated to Hollywood: Charles Laughton, Raymond Massey, Boris Karloff. The U. S. citizen most importantly involved in the proceedings is pretty Gloria Stuart, a new ingenue from Pasadena, who gets very nearly frightened out of her wits.

The story of The Old Dark House, as anyone can guess from the title, starts with three motorists ringing a musty doorbell in the hope of finding shelter from a thunderstorm. The door is opened by a butler (Boris Karloff) whose hair is unbrushed but whose face looks as though he had combed it with a threshing machine. In the old dark house, the motorists (Raymond Massey, Gloria Stuart, Melvyn Douglas) are insulted by their hosts, a family of Femms who are living in seclusion to avoid being hanged for murder. While the Femms and their guests are dining on cold roast beef, boiled potatoes and stale bread, more motorists arrive, a Welsh millionaire (Charles Laughton) and his tricky mistress (Lillian Bond). The type of hospitality to be expected in an establishment of this sort reaches its peak when the butler, who is queer when sober and mad while drunk, gulps down a bottle of gin and opens the door of a room which contains a criminal lunatic who tries to cut off Melvyn Douglas's head with a carving knife. Good shot: the criminal lunatic (Brember Wells) boasting that he knows more arson than anyone else in the world while he prepares to brighten up the old dark house by setting fire to it and its inhabitants.

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