" Stand Up and Cheer." At the Regal
Tins musical entertainment is one of the oddest films I have ever seen. The idea is that prosperity is to be revived in America by making people laugh. There is a scene at the White House in which the President—only a close-up of his back is visible—invites Lawrence Cromwell, a celebrated New York theatrical producer (Warner Baxter), to join the Govern- ment as Secretary of Amusement. This episode is very amusing, but it is treated so seriously that one hardly knows whether to take it as comedy or tragedy. Soon, in a series of swift flashes, we are shown various representatives of American labour lustily singing a song called " I'm Laughing," of which the burden, roughly, is : " Times are hard, but if I can smile— brother, so can you." Even the seamstresses in a sweat- shop join in the chorus, and at this point it seems as though Hollywood were really offering this nauseatingly complacent optimism as a remedy for America's economic troubles—as an easy way of avoiding responsibility for social reconstruction.
But as the film proceeds it becomes so wildly inconsequent that it could easily be regarded as a skit on its own initial theme. There are brief views of Lawrence Cromwell infusing dynamism into his staff and making occasional love to his organizer of children's entertainment (Madge Evans), and there is vague talk of a plot against Cromwell by a group of sinister industrialists who are backing the depression, but most of the time is given to independent variety acts which would fit equally well into a hundred other musical pictures. Far the best of these acts is a duologue between two comedians, new to me, called Mitchell and Durant. Dressed up in tail- coats as Senators, they discuss a tariff on hay-wire while turning somersaults and smacking each other's faces. It is exactly like one of Low's simian cartoons, and serves as an excellent satire on the very mood of rhetorical humbug with which the film opens.
There is one other fairly good interlude—a " hill-billy " song, She's Way tip Thar," but most of the turns are very ordinary, and the unfortunate John Boles, appearing in a " romantic scene," is condemned to sing one of the worst talkie songs ever recorded. Warner Baxter acts in his usual vigorous style, but he wears a rather worried expression ; perhaps he could not help remembering the far better oppor- tunities he had when he last appeared as a theatrical producer —in Forty-Second Street, one of the best musical talkies so far made. Eventually, a costumed horseman rides across the sky summoning everyone to a kind of pageant of prosperity, and so the film proceeds to a riotous and noisy conclusion. The horseman is probably meant to be Paul Revere, but to a British eye he more easily recalls Dick Turpin, which gives an agreeably ironic flavour to his symbolic mission as a social saviour.
Stand Up and Cheer defies all sober standards of criticism, and its atmosphere and propaganda are likely to be too strictly American for the taste of most audiences in this country ; but it is worth seeing as a curiosity—and perhaps as a partial and distorted reflection of American popular psychology since the New Deal began to set everyone wildly and hopefully wondering what would happen next. At any rate, mingled with the film's dull stretches there is a good deal of humour—sometimes intentional, sometimes not.
GENERALLY RELEASED NEXT WEEK.
Hi, Nellie.—Lively melodrama of American newspaper life, with Paul Muni as an editor who is set to run the domestic advice column as penalty for refusing to feature the disap- pearance of a vanished bank-president in whose innocence he believes. Swiftly vivid treatment of a rather harsh mixture of comedy and adventure, leading up to an engagement with gangsters in a deserted cemetery.
Bolero.—George Raft, supported by Carole Lombard, as a professional dancer who goes to the War and returns to sacrifice his life to his career. Glittering night-club settings, cleverly photographed ; fairly good dancing ; luridly emo- tional dramatic atmosphere.
CILABLES DAVY.
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