Sons o’ Guns. Jack Donahue is an awkward member of the A. E. F. Lily Damita, cinema favorite, is a bonny barmaid he meets behind the lines. In a village painted by Joseph Urban, peopled with an Albertina Rasch peasant ballet, echoing with nice tunes, they enjoy the most amiable war on record.
The Game of Love and Death. Alice Brady chooses to meet the guillotine with her husband rather than accept his noble gift of passports which would have enabled her lover and herself to escape. With this verbose French revolution episode by Remain Rolland, the Theatre Guild’s season continues to be disappointing.
The Humbug is an abstruse excursion into hypnotism with the excellent John Halliday. It quavers between melodrama and advanced psychology without notable contributions to either field.
Young Sinners reveals Raymond Guion as a young libertine who regains his wind and his principles in the Adirondacks. Playwright Elmer Harris has made a bid for the prurient trade with a sex lecture more graphic than graceful.
How’s Your Health? contains a trio of hypochondriacs whose health fluctuates according to moods and the vagaries of a broken blood-pressure gauge. Connoisseurs will be reluctant to believe that this comedy was actually written by Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson.
The Patriarch. William Courtleigh is disclosed as an aged mountaineer who acts as lawgiver for his entire region. When one of his sons slays another in a fit of sexual rage, the hoary solon is faithful to the credo of the crags and becomes the boy’s executioner. While it provokes thought, is often sensitively acted, this earnest incident has perhaps been regarded too literally, fails to achieve dramatic impact.
Charm. A rustic soda jerker keeps his Manhattan-bent sweetheart by purchasing a book on Charm and pursuing its elegant policies in the hometown parlors.
Mendel, Inc. This shenanigan about a Jewish plumber who invents a machine which will fulfill all the impersonal obligations of a housewife, has an expert Kosher trio in Joe Smith, Charles Dale and Alexander Carr (who used to play Perlmutter to Barney Bernard’s Potash). Such guffaws do they elicit that cautious critics murmurously compare the play to Abie’s Irish Rose.
Salt Water reintroduces Frank Craven who has a gift for appearing nettled. His present opportunity is that of a landlubber whose plans to follow his ancestors on the high seas are thwarted by his wife’s purchase of a ferry boat.
Fifty Million Frenchmen is a jaunty, jingling tour of Paris which pays no attention whatsoever to Gothic traceries, the Louvre or the sombre tomb of the Emperor. At one point the sightseers pass the monumental Church of the Madeleine but even their “Hallelujah!” is syncopated. Clad in the fulsome but insinuating draperies of the current princesse mode, the sightly visitors caper about such venerated Parisian landmarks as the Ritz Bar, American Express Co., Café de la Paix, Longchamps racetrack, Claridge Hotel, Château Madrid, Zelli’s—all affectionately depicted by Designer Norman Bel Geddes.
The brittle, burnished little prima donna, Genevieve Tobin, is much occupied with an impulsive vacationist (William Gaxton). Having wagered that he can win her in a month from a penniless start, he pursues many queer trades including that of gigolo. Meanwhile Jack Thompson dances with sleek exuberance and everyone in the cast has a chance to sing at least one of Cole Porters songs. One of the most Porteresque is that in which Helen Broderick, sly comedienne, traces the progress of an oyster down and up the esophagus of a Long Island dowager. Toward the finale the California Collegians’ jazz band gives insane imitations of apes and seals and you leave the theatre in wistful sympathy with the character who remarks of Parisians: “They have the Liberty and we have the Statue. “
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