THE CINEMA
"Nothing Sacred." At the London Pavilion—" Something to Sing About." At the Plaza.
BECAUSE there is at the least a demi-cauldron of good honest hate about it, Nothing Sacred makes all the other crazy comedies look rather drab. It is difficult to determine who was most responsible for the various ingredients of this hell-brew, but one may safely attribute a fair number to Ben Hecht, whose story, and presumably dialogue, it is ; a further propor- tion to William Wellman, who directed the film with really vicious certainty ; a certain amount to the presiding genii of Technicolour, chiefly for the contrast between the dignified greyness of New York's aerial skyscrapers and the garish clash of feminine raiment ; and a great deal to Carole Lombard, who here slashes her way out of the bargain basement of petty criminality into the higher regions of jewelled villainy. The sequences of pure craziness are significantly the least exciting ; the scene, for instance, where Fredric March and Carole Lombard crack each other smartly on the chinpoint is a minor incident in comparison with the scenes of general and untrammelled barbarity with which the rest of the film is crammed.
It would be easy to use the word "Satire," for in the dim background the film has a satirical basis, but it would probably be rating it too high. For
"Satire should, like a polished razor keen,
Wound with a touch that's scarcely felt or seen,"
while in this case the weapon is an ironical bludgeon, garlanded with grog-blossoms of coarse but attractive humour. The story tells of a. girl in a small town who is thought to be dying of radium-poisoning. An enterprising news-reporter has the idea of bringing her to New York, as guest of his paper, to "see life" in the few weeks remaining to her. He puts the proposal to her a moment after she has been told that she is really as fit as a fiddle, but with sublime simplicity both she and her doctor ignore this fact and accept the invitation. New York welcomes her with smoke messages in the sky, and the :keys of the City. She appears at night clubs (tableaux of heroines of history), and folk have only to see her to burst into tears of spurious and decadent sentimentality. Unfor- tunately the reporter falls in love with her, and cables for the world's greatest radium specialist as a last hope. Cornered, she resorts to an orgy of fake suicide and unprincipled lying ; and finally she escapes to the South Seas with the reporter, while a State funeral is accorded her in New York.
It will be seen that it is hardly a plot for the squeamish or the shockable ; there is only one person in the story who has any sense of decency a: all, and that is the reporter (Fredric March), whose married prospects with the unscrupulous minx one cannot help viewing with thep concern. There is indeed a fundamental distaste for humanity here, which might have given the film something approaching the lusty hatred of a play like Vo/pone ; but this the producers, quite rightly, doubtful of the public stomach, have carefully avoided. The film remains funny, packed with incident and with exceed, ingly clever dialogue, and because it does at least hold up a mirror, even though it be a distorting mirror, to a very real world of ballyhoo and cheap sensationalism the pleasure to be obtained from it is something more than the usual mulish guffaw.
A better scenario than that of Something to Sing About might have been chosen for James Cagney's long-awaited return. This weak and far too episodic skit on Hollywood production methods (it is about time this genre was given a rest) only gives him a half-chance to re-establish the genuine acting ability which he showed previously both as the tough little gangster-boy and in his superb performance as Bottom in the Dream. The opening scenes, which present him, surprisingly enough, as a dance-band leader with a talent for tap-dancing, deliberately invite comparison with Fred Astaire ; nor do they in any way damage the reputation of that twinkling genius. The Hollywood sequences, which depict Cagney being painfully groomed for stardom, are mildly amu-iing, but only spring to life when Cagney, back on his old form, turns a staged studio fight into a real rough-house
of the most gratifying nature. BASIL WRIGHT.
Previous page
