The Cinema
"Poppy." At the Plaza—" Living Dangerously" and "Charley Chan at the Circus." At the Regal IT is the loud check trousers we first see, a pair of shoe; which have known their best days, and as the camera travels up to the extraordinary swollen nose, the little cunning heartless eyes, the period top-hat, we become aware of the W. C. Fields voice, that low rich grumble rather like the noise of a distant train, which will presently swell, we know from experience, into loud rotund periods, the words a little. misapplied—" Forgive my redundancy, dear madam, forgive my redundancy." Mr. Fields' latest incarnation is Professor Eustace McGargle, a travelling quack, a three-card man (he uses one of his cards to stuff a hole in his daughter's shoe), temporarily down on his luck. The story is an old and sentimental one : how the professor, with the help of a forged marriage certificate and the services of a crooked country solicitor, Mr. Whiffen, claims for his innocent young daughter the local Pakenham fortune, how he is double- crossed by Whiffen, escapes with difficulty from the sheriff, and how his daughter, who is not really his daughter at all, turns out to be the genuine heiress. Professor McGargle, of course, in the accepted Chaplin tradition, moves on—in the. mayor's best hat, with one of the mayor's cigars in his mouth and the mayor's best silver nobbed cane in his hand.
But the story doesn't really matter, for Mr. Fields has never acted better. There is no touch of sentimentality in his performance. When he says good-bye for the last time to his adopted daughter with spurious tears in the old boar eyes, his final word of advice is, " Never give a sucker an even break." The scenarist has had the good sense to leave Mr. Fields' villainy undimmed by any genuine affection. He wins our hearts not by a display of Chaplin sentiment, not by class solidarity (he robs the poor as promptly as the rich), but simply by the completeness of his dishonesty. To watch Mr. Fields, as Dickensian as anything Dickens ever wrote, is a form of escape for poor human creatures : we who are haunted by pity, by fear, by our sense of right and wrong, who are tongue-tied by conscience, watch with envious love this free spirit robbing the gardener of ten dollars, cheating the country yokels by his own variant of the three-card trick, faking a marriage certificate, and keeping up all the time, in the least worthy and the most embarrassing circumstances, his amazing flow of inflated sentiments. There is something in Mr. Fields' appearance which has always reminded me of Mr. Baldwin (or at any rate of Low's cartoon of Mr. Baldwin), but it is Mr. Fields' most delightful characteristic that his lips are never, for one moment, sealed, for he fills up even the blanks in the script with his rumble of unintelligible rotundities.
The other two films on my list will have left the Regal by the time this notice appears, but it is quite worth watching for them at local cinemas. Living Dangerously is an English melodrama with an American star, Mr. Otto Kruger, the story of a doctor " framed " by his partner, who accuses him of sexual relations with his wife while treating her professionally. He is struck off the register by the General Medical Council and goes to America with the woman. The husband follows them and tries to blackmail him, and the film begins with the murder of the blackmailer and ends with the District Attorney helping the doctor to make his " self-defence " plea convincing. It is not a very satisfying film, but it is above the usual standard of English pictures, and the scene of the trial before the General Medical Council, where no witnesses are sworn and any lies can be told in the box without fear of perjury, is excellent. We are used to America criticising her institu- tions on the screen, but it is unusual in this country for a picture with some bite and bitterness to get past the censor.
As for Charley Chan he needs no recommendation. The fihns in which he appears are all genuine detective films as distinct from thrillers, they are always well-made and well-acted. The new picture is particularly agreeable, for we see Mr. Chan for the first time in a domestic setting and meet not only his amorous eldest son but his complete family of fourteen.
GaAnAm GREENE.
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