The Cinema
"Rose of the Rancho." At the Plaza " Jack of All
Trades." At the Marble Arch Pavilion
1,:i GL.: DYS SwAnTuour is the latest singer from the Metropolitan Opera House to " go movie " and to my mind, which cares little for music, the most agreeable. Rose of the Rancho is a very long way indeed from being a good film, but at least it is without the bogus seriousness, the artiness, the pomposity of Miss Grace Moore's and Miss Pons's pictures. There is nothing operatic about it : no love-life- of a prima donna, no blithe Dome or wistful Rotonde, no first appearance in New York threatened by unhappy Romance. It is just a commonplace Western (the scene is actually New Mexico) with galloping horses and last-minute rescues and masked riders, and a secret federal agent who falls in love with the bandit. One could do very happily without the music alto- gether, for Miss Swarthout is quite as attractive as any other star dummy, whether she is wearing a mantilla as Queen of Santa Something festa, or, as the mysterious leader of the patriotic brigands, black riding breeches. And one could do very happily, too, without Mr. John Boles. I find Mr. Boles, his air of confident carnality, the lick of black shiny hair across the plump white waste of face, peculiarly unsympathetic ; and never more so than in this film as he directs his lick, his large assured amorous eyes, towards Miss Swarthout and croons :
" I call you a gift from the angels, For I feel in my heart you're divine."
That is about the standard of the lush last-century melodies which interrupt rather oddly the gun-shots, the beating hoofs, the traditional American dialogue that one begins after a while to welcome rather wearily like very old friends whose conversation one has exhausted---" Siddown won't you—Thenk.s." " A wise guy, huh ? "
Mr. Hulbert is another actor for whom I feel a perhaps unfair repugnance. The beginning of Jack of All Trades, however, shows him at his best, as he gate-crashes into a job with a big financial house by inventing on the spur of the moment a plan, the magic contemporary word. No banker dares to confess that he has heard of the Plan for the first time, and the scene at the board meeting, when Mr. Hulbert, asked to explain it in connexion with Rationalisation (another magic word he doesn't know-the -meaning of), carries the directors with him by reciting Henry Vs speech before Agin- court, is excellent and pointed fooling. Afterwards the film degenerates into nothing but the jutting jaw and the per- manent grin, the :ante memory that one takes away front all Mr. Hulbert's films, a nightmare memory, for what could be more horrifying than a jaw and a grill moving through restaurants and along streets, in and out of offices, down subways, an awful eternal disembodied Cheeriness ?
I wish there existed an organisation with the means to anthologise the excellent sequences that can so often be Penal in the worst films and save them front oblivion. Mr. Hulbert's scene at the board meeting might find a place, and the fight in 'Frisco Kid, shown last week at the Regal, �viadd certainly deserve to be included. 'Frisco Kid was a -ale sentimental worthless film with the same kind of tough, period subject, without the style, as Barbary Coast, but the light between Mr. James Copley and a one-armed sailor with a hook was the most brutal and convincing I can remember seeing on the screen. Another sequence well worth saving occurred in a silly English musical farce shaven last week at the Plaza, Public Nuisance Number One-: the singing by Miss Frances Day of a delightful skit on a Victorian ballad : I had a dog. It got lost in a fog " (it thoroughly puzzled an audience which took the canine sentiment quite seriously). Admirably directed, admirably acted, this sequence was worth sitting through all the long weary film to see. It was even worth bearing with patience Mr. Riscoe's contorted music-hall face which thrust every joke down one's gullet with the relentless energy of the machine that corks the bot- tles in a lemonade factory. Miss Frances Day, with her ashen hair, her humorous elongated face, her lovely witty and malicious eyes, given a Capra to direct her or a Guitry to write for her, would rival in one's affections Miss Claudette Colbert or Mlle. Jacqueline Delubac. Gameur GerrxE.
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