The Thirty-Nine Steps (Gaumont-British) neatly converts its essential implausihility into an asset by stressing the difficulties which confront its hero when he tries to tell outsiders about the predicament he is in. A young Canadian named Richard Hannay (Robert Donat), he finds himself one evening, as the result of nothing more daring than a visit to a London music hall, entertaining in his fiat a girl who tells him that she is a counter-espionage agent protecting England from an international ring which is selling the secrets of the Air Ministry and that she has just committed a murder. Hannay considers this nonsense until the next morning, when he finds his guest dying with a knife in her back. Thus assured of her veracity, he constitutes himself heir to her quest and with the meagre information she has given him sets out to solve the riddle of the Thirty-Nine Steps.
Harried by the police, who suspect him of murdering the counterspy, by the members of the ring, who soon find out that he is on their trail, and by a charming young lady (Madeleine Carroll) whom he picks up in the course of a wild night on the Scottish moors, Hannay plunges through a series of hairbreadth escapes and escapades, some of them horrifying, some of them extraordinarily funny. The funniest, possibly, is the one in which, mistaken at a political meeting for the speaker of the evening, he makes himself the hero of the occasion by an address composed of foolish generalities. The most exciting is that which brings the story back to its starting point in the music hall, where a final pistol shot punctures the mystery permanently.
In the last two years, by making a specialty of melodrama, the English cinema industry sometimes appears to have taken its motto from the words of a song popular in the U. S. a year ago. ”Here Come the British with a Bang, Bang.” The Thirty-Nine Steps is the most effective demonstration to date of Director Alfred Hitchcock’s method of artful understatement and its success, which has already been sensational abroad, should be a lesson to his Hollywood imitators. The film is an adaptation of a novel written 20 years ago by John Buchan, now Lord Tweedsmuir, who next month will go to Canada as that Dominion’s Governor-General (TIME, Aug. 19). This high-placed connection made it possible for the British film industry to improve notably upon Hollywood methods of ballyhoo. The premiere of The Thirty-Nine Steps in London was preceded, not by a mere broadcast, but by a Gaumont-British banquet at which the guests of honor were Lord Tweedsmuir, Home Secretary Sir John Simon, Minister for Air Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister and their ladies.
The Big Broadcast of 1936 (Paramount), a collection of specialty acts by radio entertainers, might have been much more satisfactory if its producers had not insisted on incorporating them into a story. Any narrative framework designed to include Amos ‘n’ Andy, Ray Noble, Ethel Merman, Henry Wadsworth, Lyda Roberti, Burns & Allen, Sir Guy Standing, Mary Boland, Charles Ruggles, Jack Oakie, Ina Ray Hutton and her Melodears, Wendy Barrie, Bing Crosby, the Vienna Choir Boys and Bill Robinson could scarcely be distinguished for its spontaneity. The device which shackles them together in The Big Broadcast is a “tele-radio” set in which Oakie and Wadsworth, as two radio performers marooned in the castle of a crazy countess (Lyda Roberti), are able to see a series of broadcasts in which the other members of the cast do their turns. As self-conscious as it sounds, it is an artifice of which the only redeeming feature is that it may suit the baser tastes of the case-hardened radio addicts for whom the picture was patently designed.
Of the moments when The Big Broadcast offers its audience some respite from the story the most enjoyable are those in which Bill Robinson demonstrates that he is still the ablest tap-dancer in the world, Bing Crosby sings I Wished on the Moon and Ethel Merman cavorts with a chorus of elephants to a tune called It’s the Animal in Me.
Storm over the Andes (Universal) tells an improbable story about an implausible group of wildcat aviators who help Bolivia win a fictitious war-in-the-air over the Gran Chaco. It inevitably portrays a cocky, ready-fisted individual (Jack Holt) whose general unpleasantness includes the fact that he can fly better than his comrades. When Holt falls in love with an unknown, charming lady (Mona Barrie) at a fiesta, she turns out to be the wife of his commanding officer (Antonio Moreno). Holt saves Moreno from perishing in the jungle after a crash, steals an enemy plane, bombs an ammunition dump, captures the Paraguayan ace, El Zorro, “the fox who flies like an eagle.”
Equipped with appallingly threadbare dialog, Storm over the Andes gives a curious impression (except for the airplanes) of having been made 20 years ago when Cinemactor Moreno was matching wits with the Hooded Terror and other hobgoblins of the old serials.
Broadway Melody of 1936 (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). That capacity for taking the cinema conscientiously, which has kept Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from making a really good musical revue since the original Broadway Melody (1929), is forgotten, with happy results, in the present version. The proceedings evidently must have cost a lot of money and some pains but the result is pleasant entertainment. The people who sing and dance are not film stars who have learned some routines to appear in a musical but troupers who have made themselves famed as singers and dancers.
Producer John Considine violated another taboo by building the story around a tap dancer, Eleanor Powell, instead of the usual soprano. Miss Powell plays the part of Irene Foster, an upState girl who goes to Manhattan to get a job with Bob Gordon (Robert Taylor), a musical comedy producer who was her high-school sweetheart. Gordon’s enemy, Columnist Bert Keeler (Jack Benny), has invented a French actress, La Belle Arlette. To confuse Gordon, who refuses to give her a job, Irene steps into the fictitious identity. The rest of her stepping, which occupies considerable footage, confirms her status as the world’s greatest female tap dancer. The picture includes the best specialty acts procurable: Robert Wildhack in his discourse on snoring, with examples; Frances Langford singing the show’s best song, You Are My Lucky Star; June Knight and Nick Long Jr. introducing a new dance, Broadway Rhythm; Vilma & Buddy Ebsen dancing & singing On a Sunday Afternoon. Other good songs: Sing Before Breakfast, I’ve Got a Feelin’ You’re Foolin’, Broadway Rhythm.
The Return of Peter Grimm (RKO). Lionel Barrymore is the cantankerous florist who, feeling a cold breath on his cheek, hastily completes arrangements to perpetuate the two projects dearest to his heart: his nurseries, and the happiness of his ward, Helen Mack. When, after death, he discovers that his plans will result only in decimating the first and stultifying the second he comes back. He has trouble getting through to the living at first, finally finds a doorway open to him—the mind of a child (George Breakston) who is slipping over into his world. Through that youngster he saves the nurseries, keeps Allen Vincent, a nephew with unpleasant characteristics, from marrying Miss Mack, and brings to light an old seduction.
All performances in The Return of Peter Grimm are good and its general tone, despite the camera’s inability to produce the incorporeal except in smeared dissolves, has the quiet literate authority that Producer Kenneth Macgowan usually gets into his output.
There is one ghost that stamps itself unforgettably on The Return of Peter Grimm: the shaggy white-haired shade of the late David Belasco, its original author, director and producer. When in 1911 Belasco turned out this play, he put so much of himself into it that he used to confide to friends: “Like Shakespeare, this, I think, will live forever.” Defying two theatrical decades, The Return of Peter Grimm continues to fulfill its author’s boast.
The Goose and the Gander (Warner). A lady (Kay Francis) decides to inveigle her divorced husband’s second wife and the man (George Brent) with whom she is misbehaving to a mountain lodge, have the husband discover them there. The plan works perfectly until a pair of jewel thieves appear at the lodge also, hide their swag in a fireplace.
Thereafter, the comedy in The Goose and the Gander consists of the efforts of the guests at the lodge to conceal their identities. The picture’s suspense is contributed by the jewel thieves’ attempts to retrieve their swag. Its charm resides in the fact that George Brent can wrinkle his nose whereas Kay Francis cannot pronounce “r.” Good shot: a bedazzled police chief (Spencer Charters) trying to make the company at the lodge explain what they are up to.
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