Hot for Paris (Fox). The assumption of special characteristics belonging to special classes or races—characteristics which stay the same no matter what is happening—is the basic device of this picture as it is of half the good comedies in existence. Just as a Scotsman in a vaudeville joke must be a pinchpenny, so the two Frenchmen who follow a roughneck sailor to pay him the $1,000,000 he ha? won in a lottery are always polite. No matter how much of a hurry they are in they never forget to take their hats off to each other. This may be the kind of thing that has made critics assert that laughter is founded on a sense of superiority,* but Hot for Paris will flatter that sense only broadly, good-humoredly. Director Raoul Walsh is said to have thought up the story while he was riding in an airplane. Typical gags: “You must have a sweetport in every heart”; “coal miners” used instead of “gold diggers”; Swedish seamen interrupting Victor McLaglen as he pours out his heart in passionate metaphors to Fifi Dorsay.
Throw of the Dice (British Instructional). That dicing in India has the importance of a national issue is the rather incredible instruction that U. S. audiences will get out of this film. The dice pass between two young brown kings who start shooting for money, then for jewels, then for kingdoms, then for women. When a clever little boy finds out that the dice are loaded, the news comes as a call to arms and a whole state rises furiously to march on the palace of King Sohat, the crooked shooter. Punctuating these absurdities are scenes of horror involving poisoned arrows, cobras and a few fine pictures—these almost justifying the silly story—of what India is like. Best shot: 8,000 elephant?.
The Man from the Restaurant
(Amkino). Not long before his death Anton Chekhov, Russia’s greatest short story writer (see p. 64), married Actress Olga Knipper of the Moscow Art Theatre. While he was ill in Yalta, writing stories “feebly, sometimes not more than five or six lines a day,” she went on playing her roles and corresponding with him about the child they were expecting. But Olga Knipper had a miscarriage, and the Chekhov who plays a waiter in this picture is not—as the arrogance of the famous name he uses without modifiers seems to proclaim—Chekhov’s son, but Chekhov’s nephew Mikhail. It is an earnest but not very adept story of the hatred of privilege that smoldered so long in the hearts of the Russian people. Best sequence: the banknote that Mikhail Chekhov picks up and hides, first in his sock, then under his shirtfront, then in his pocket, and finally gives back to its owner, who forgets to thank him.
* Psychologist Henri Bergson, most famed student of laughter, says it is mainly a social phenomenon. “Our laughter is always the laughter of a group. . . . However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary.”
More Must-Reads from TIME
- L.A. Fires Show Reality of 1.5°C of Warming
- Home Losses From L.A. Fires Hasten ‘An Uninsurable Future’
- The Women Refusing to Participate in Trump’s Economy
- Bad Bunny On Heartbreak and New Album
- How to Dress Warmly for Cold Weather
- We’re Lucky to Have Been Alive in the Age of David Lynch
- The Motivational Trick That Makes You Exercise Harder
- Column: No One Won The War in Gaza
Contact us at letters@time.com