Cinema: The New Pictures: Aug. 28, 1933

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Morning Glory (RKO). This banal story adapted from a play by Zoe Akins brings a stagestruck young girl (Katharine Hepburn) from Vermont to a Manhattan theatrical office where her naive conceit amuses a famed producer (Adolphe Menjou), engages the admiration of a playwright (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) and the friendly tutelage of an old actor (C. Aubrey Smith). She vainly loves the producer, uses the other two. When the star of a play demands an impossible salary raise 15 minutes before opening night curtain, the understudy turns out to be the little girl from Vermont who steps into the star's place, leaves critics and friends groggy with awe.

From this immemorial fairy tale, the delicate, muscled face of Heroine Hepburn shines out like a face on a coin. Of the brash little provincial she makes a strangely distinguished character, a little mad from hunger and dreams, absurdly audacious and trusting. Since Christopher Strong, she has toned down her strident voice, taken off some of her "angular swank in gesture and strut, found other ways to register emotion than by dilating her nostrils. In Morning Glory she convinced Manhattan audiences that the playwright had good reason to feel she had the makings of a great actress. Flawless with women, Director Lowell Sherman tried to make all the men act in his own twitching style.

The Power & the Glory (Fox). Hot with his campaign to make Paramount sorry it let him go last September, pear-faced, bankrupt Jesse Louis Lasky was badly wanting something he could call a cinema novelty when able Playwright Preston Sturges brought him the 60-page script of this sentimental tale of a U.S. railroad tycoon. Clapping his hands, Mr. Lasky told Director William K. Howard to shoot it exactly as written, and forthwith broadcast a huge publicity about a revolutionary cinema technic called "narratage." Narratage is a method a century old in fiction writing, perfected in the short novels of Joseph Conrad and the short stories of O. Henry: the trick of chopping a story's straight time sequence into parts, rearranging them arbitrarily and issuing them through the mouth of a bystander.

The Power & the Glory opens with a suicide tycoon's funeral, attended by one true mourner, the tycoon's boyhood chum and confidential secretary. Back in his own parlor, the secretary tells his curious wife what a great good man was the late Tom Garner (Spencer Tracy). The wife rates Garner contrarily, a wicked, brutal, libidinous ingrate. The secretary attempts to come at the conscientiously mixed truth by "narrataging" the tycoon's life. His coaxing voice drones on through the subsequent flashbacks, now & then speaks for the characters as they open their synchronized mouths, sometimes stops to let the characters speak for themselves. The story becomes an argument between secretary and wife in which her specific accusations are indirectly answered by flashbacks, broken by an occasional return to the secretary's parlor for a new accusation.

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