THE CINEMA
" The Marx Brothers at the Circus." At the Empire.
" Disputed Passage." At the Plaza.—" Paramount News." At Various Cinemas.
THE old crazy sets have gone now for good, that air of a world run up like a pioneer village overnight at the least expense. We must regretfully accept the fact that, thanks to the Metro millions, the Marx Brothers are finally imprisoned in the Hollywood world. I prefer the circus to the opera and the races—there is no Miss Maureen O'Sullivan here to bring our enjoyment crashing down with the whisper " Silly " as Groucho lopes lecherously past. There are young lovers and a story that runs carefully from A to B—Mr. Kenny Baker with his soprano speech and his plump eye-sockets plays a rich Newport young man who shocks his relatives by managing a circus and musically loving an equestrienne (" We've got it oh so bad, but isn't it good. . . . Don't know fish from cake, Don't know if its doughnut or a wedding cake . . . two blind loves "), there's a villain who wants to own the circus and hires a strong man and a dwarf to rob the manager of the takings, and Groucho, the small-town lawyer with his old umbrella, his stained frock-coat, his wild gleam, and erratic intelligence, is on the trail, ventre a terre. He may be cramped by the classy direction, by the fine circus sets and the exciting shots of freight trains moving against a dark sky, the admirable Mervyn Le Roy dope, but he manages all the same to break away to the padded silken side of Madame Dumont (one of Newport's 400) stretched as usual on her Pompadour couch as though she had never moved an inch since the delectable days of Horsefeathers and Duck Soup.
This is Groucho's film : Chico and Harpo are a long way behind : Groucho singing about a woman tattooist—" Lydia, oh Lydia, that encyclopaedia ": Groucho putting on the dingy tails (" It would take a magician," he complains, " to get into this suit," and Chico replies, " I got it from a magician "), unearthing the white rabbit, the flags of all nations (Harp° pulls out a toy rifle and a band plays), a pigeon (" It's all right. It's a homing pigeon." " Then I'll keep a light burn- ing in my pocket."): Groucho stuck upside down on the ceil- ing in suctional boots : Groucho undressing coyly behind the circus lady's screen, hanging up his combined black stockings and long pants : Groucho bearding Madame Dumont in her bedroom. Impossible to explain all the stages to the superb climax when Madame Dumont is shot protestingly out of a cannon, and Groucho, Harpo, the villain and a murderous ape cling to the flying trapeze while she hurtles towards them in her Newport robe and her bursting seams.
Is it, when you come to think of it, a much odder story than Disputed Passage, which is about a great surgeon and his great pupil, and how the pupil falls in love with a Chinese girl (but she's only Chinese by upbringing, so the tale is eugenically sound), and how the surgeon tries to break the romance in the cause of science (but really it's because his wife died years ago of appendicitis), and his pupil in the last twenty minutes quarrels with him, pursues the girl to China and gets bombed by Japanese: his life's despaired of, the great surgeon arrives by 'plane and operates, " science has done everything it can," the girl turns up too, all's well, and the surgeon admits—for dubious reasons—that there must be a soul. A prologue shows the author, Mr. Lloyd Douglas— who wrote that other medical marvel, Magnificent Obsession— penning a few lines in his library to the producers : " Dear Paramount, thank you for preserving the full flavour of my story." .. . I should describe the flavour as a rather nauseating blend of iodine and glucose.
Mr. Douglas's heart-wounds look a bit shabby in this mined, torpedoed world. The Paramount News, with its remarkable record of the rescue by the Independence Hall ' of the survivors of the Yorkshire '—the broken ship diving out of sight, the white drifting faces on the water—beat any so-called serious film off the screen. No Hollywood tragedy can afford comparison with the beaten puzzled faces of the Lascar sailors (their heads are bandaged because their- officers had to knock them out with life-preservers before pitching them overboard in life-belts), the orphaned child who looks as if she's missed a party, the coffin pitched into the sea wrapped in another country's flag—there's got to be a flag. GRaitmit GREENE.
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