New Play in Manhattan

Missouri Legend (by Elizabeth B. Ginty; produced by Guthrie McClintic in association with Max Gordon), half a clowning comic strip, half a romantic daguerreotype, is based on the life of Jesse James. Playwright Ginty, with some support from history, has made James (Dean Jagger) into a droll sort of Jekyll & Hyde who, when not "riding out," is Thomas Howard of St. Joe, Mo., a sober family man with a mousy wife (Dorothy Gish), and a pillar of the local Baptist church.

Playwright Ginty's triumph of make-believe is that she has created, out of one part pious bluenose and one part murderous bandit, a lively, attractive, fun-loving Tom Rover. Nobody even bothers to wonder whether Thomas Howard might not be a sniveling hypocrite: at worst, he would seem to justify his forays as Falstaff justified his thefts: " 'Tis my vocation, Hal. 'tis no sin for a man to labor in his vocation.'' For almost three acts Jesse James labors with gusto. But History and the Wages of Sin have to win out, and Jesse is finally shot.

Missouri Legend is stale bread, but bread that is bound to fall butter side up because both sides are buttered. On the one side, there is the romantic bad man and all the melodramatic hokum ever devised, including the widder woman preyed upon by the wily banker. And if this side does not please sophisticated Broadway as it once pleased a gaslit Bowery, there is Playwright Ginty's nimble kidding and drawling backwoods humor to save the day.

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