PUBLIC CINEMA

By Celluloid
IHIE CYCLE PICTURE
As cinema grows and waxes stronger it 'becomes increasingly obvious that studios must specialise. At present they are all running helter-skelter after each other, stealing each other's ideas and always trying to go one better. The cycle picture is the result and the cycle picture is not only a curse of cinema, it is a cause of financial disaster. A cycle always starts with success and ends in failure.
A good picture sets a fashion, and fashions in pictures, as in everything else. run mad; they get worked to death and die detested. A great picture, like any great thing, has its rights, and its reputation is the greatest of them; but by the time a cycle has worked itself out the reputation, deservedly earned by the parent picture, is dissipated. It takes a good picture to start a cycle: it takes a miracle of a picture to live a cycle down.
A very little while ago everybody was mad with delight over The Private Life of Henry VIII. It started a cycle, studios everywhere went delving into history, adapting it, inventing it, or both, until now the world is weary of the "costume picture and Henry VIII. instead of resting gently on the laurels it earned, is just one of them. The same happened with Broadway Melody and the " musicals," with The Perfect Alibi and the " gangsters,with Grand Hotel and the " cross section " cycle. it has happened, it is happening. and it will continue to happen until something is done about it.
Walt Disney Cartoons
What must be done is indicated by the only type picture that has started a cycle and survived—the Walt Disney cartoon. Mickey Mouse has had his imitsitors, the Silly Symphonies have been copied, but while their upstart rivals have waxed and waned, the " Mickeys " and the " Sillies " have held their public and maintained their popularity.
Walt Disney is a specialist. he keeps up a very big and well-equipped studio and produces only—cartoons. He keeps his cartoons alive because he lives by them. .1-4e cannot take a chance, he cannot hope themselves and to the art in their industry others might follow his example. You may get but you do not seek, art in a department store. You will never get the best in any one kind of picture from a studio that is producing all sorts. The next and most obvious step forward in cinema will come when studios begin to specialise. When one studio concentrates on musicals, another in straight comedy, another in opera, another in low comedy, another in " documentaries," another in social drama, and still another in costume plays, they will develop their types, their casts, their audiences, their names will begin to mean more than a Little to the average picture-goer, and the risky cycle with its waves of interest and apathy will cease.
NEW FILMS " The Crusades"
The Carlton "It's kinda rough for ycr, lady," is not quite the language you would expect from a crusader, or is it? Any way, it is what you get from the crusaders of the Chateau de Mile.
Cecil B. de Mille is no artist, but he is a grand artisan. Years ago he evolved a formula and, ever since, he has been building to it: all his intimacies are pauses between spectacles, he gasps his way from crowd to crowd, and the man can handle crowds.
All his crowds are good, a distant crowd " shot " through an arch, is fine; the crusaders, beaten and battered, swarming up the steps to the cross, is grand, the bombardment of Acre is an epic. On a big scale he is magnificent, in the "smalls" he is inclined to wilt; a triangle love drama in a holy war setting does not belong; the ideal that actuated the individuals is lost in petty bickerings, and the dialogue is too often funny.
Spectacle cannot compensate for dignity, and though there is an obvious desire for reverence, the desire is attempted more through size than dignity, and falls short of its endeavour. Perhaps the greatest of Christian gestures is too big even for cinema.
The spirit of the League of Nations obtrudes itself into a league bigger than it could ever be. You cannot talk about peace in the middle of a holy war; where men are fighting for God they cannot make terms with men; however. it is a praiseworthy humanist conception, and entertainment on a big scale.
It is time to protest against minor, easily avoidable inaccuracies. We ignored them in George Arliss's Cardinal Richelieu, but surely there are Catholics enough in Hollywood to tell directors that you cannot give black-handed bIessings(correct up and down but with a " gra-cher I" action across), or to tell Mr. Aubrey Smith why he felt awkward when he tried to do the job left-handed. Aubrey Smith looks better than he sounds as Peter the Hermit; Henry Wilcoxon is a grand swashbuckling agnostic as Cceur de Lion, Ian Keith full of knightly suavity as Saladin. C. Henry Gordon, even without his moustache, as Philip of France, is still a " big shot "; Katherine de Mille is commendably cattish. and Loretta Young, as always, lovely to look at. It's a big picture.
" Me and Marlborough"
New Gallery Me and Marlborough gives the impression of having started out to be a really big film and got tired on the way. Cecily Courtneidge and Tom Walls especially with that most positive of actors, Alfred Drayton, in support, ought to be able to carry anything, but they never managed to get Me and Marlborough on the move, and that despite a good song, " All for a shilling a day." Cecily and Tom, with a grand string of blood horses, just jerk their way through Flanders like a taxicab in Fleet Street dropping names plucked from regimental colours and phrases which seem to be significant but do not register. Cecily Courtheidgc is England's best low comedienne; here she is out of her element. Tom Walls, when he consents to keep the party clean (he does here) is a grand comedian, and he is out of his element. Victor Saville is G. B.'s ace director, and he is out of his element. Maybe the costume period got them all down.
" Casino de Paree " Smart Girl"
The Plaza.
The Plaza is running a double bill with one picture doing all the :houting and the other most of the delivering. Al Jolson has a big voice and he uses it with more effect than charm in Casino de Paree (called in America "Go into your Dance"), a back-stage"musical" in which he appears with his charming wife, with the beautiful and talented understandings, Ruby Keeler.
It is the old mammy-singing Jolson cracking jokes that belong to the costume period, but this time keeping his tonsils to himself. Ruby Keeler saves him from his weaknesses, the while she weakens herself. With the aid of Glenda Farrell, as his sister, he is re-instated on a Broadway that had banished him. Helen Morgan, with strangely unmelodious song, and Patsy Kelly introduced perhaps because she happened to be lying about " spare "; with a tense little drama to pad out the usual dancing sccnas, raise an ordinary sort of song and dance show to the class known as " super." It is one of those happy instances of ordinary actors doing extraordinary things with ordinary material. Our own Ida Lupin° leaps forward metaphorically as Lupinos are expected to leap literally; she makes an extraordinarily nice, nice girl, more alive and natural than life. Old Joe Cawthorn as a ladies' hatter is delightfully amusing, Kent Douglas comes to life as a human process server, the ridiculouslynamed Pinky Tomlin is refreshingly ridiculous, while Adrienne Ames and Sidney Blackmer provide the sinister element. A very pleasing surprise.
" Alias Mary Dow" " Chinatown Squad"
The Capitol.
Sally Filers is always easy on the eyes and as the tough girl who, to save a mother's life, impersonates a daughter (aristocracy, U.S.A. variety) kidnapped a score of years before she turns in a performance many a better acclaimed actress would be proud of. Alias Mary Dow is Sally's picture and, as hash-slinger, dance-hall hostess or as a rough diamond trying to polish herself, she carries it well. Raymond Milland is sympathetically adequate as the love interest with Napoleon (or Violet), an elderly bull-dog, as an aider and abettor.
It is a doggy picture, for it has a grand little Scottie, too. There are more than the average number of improbabilities and a few loose ends are left untied, but it is a nice sort of picture for all that. Just the sort you like to find in a programme.
If you can imagine a decent sort of fellow who, having got sut of an American police forced and achieved a respectable position as driver of a " rubber-neck waggon " sightseeing motor coach " to you), wants to get back into said police force, you will appreciate Lyle Talbot in the murder mystery, Chinatown Squad. A scheming occidental gets " bumped off" in an oriental chop-suey joint. A fat wad and a jade ring disappear, the police sirens begin to wail and the hunt is up. Andy Devine, huskily, tries to escape to improbable ending. Well up to a good average.
" Woman Wanted" " Calm Yourself"
The Empire.
The two Empire pictures are as ordinary as their titles; good, ordinary, everyday factory-made stuff, The Woman Wanted is Maureen O'Sullivan. The law wants her for a murder she, of course, did not commit, and Joel McCrea gets her for keeps. Joel is a young lawyer who does not let his engagement to Adrienne Ames keep him out of circulation. There is some gangster stuff, a "whoopeeparty, some "speeding " on land and water 'n that.
" Fretting done for Fussy Folks " might have been Robert Young's slogan It wasn't. It was Calm Yourself. and he adopted it when thrown out on his ear when his boss, Claude Gillingwater, caught him " necking " with his, old Claude's, daughter, Betty Furness; Robert decided to take other people's troubles on himself, for a consideration. He got a dog, a baby, and Madge Evans. I-le keeps Madge and leaves Betty in the discards, which is rough on Betty, or perhaps not. The situation presents possibilities, some of which are grasped.
Sometimes, when you go to the pictures, after a sequence or two, you say, " Oh, oh, I've seen this before." That sort of thing is liable to happen to either of these. Even when you haven't, you have—if you get me.
" Travelling Saleslady"
The Regal.
This is film no. 12 for this week, and in it we save the best laugh for the end. Joan Blondell and Hugh Herbert in a domestic-commercial comedy, in which Joan, refused a position in the family toothpaste business, sells her talents and Hugh Herbert with a grand invention to the opposition. William Gargan as a rival " drummer " and Glenda Farrell as a rival are in sunnort. as are rirrint