Street Scene (United Artists). In making a picture out of Elmer Rice’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Producer Samuel Goldwyn proceeded simply. He bought the screen rights for $150,000, hired eight actors from the original cast, photographed the play as directly as possible. Inevitable comparison between the play and the cinema reflects no discredit on the latter. It loses a little by necessary abridgments in dialog and by the limitations of the camera when confronted by the peculiar problems of the mise-en-scene, but these are trivial defects. In the large, the cinema achieves the same effect as the play: a neat melodrama given an illusion of depth by the perspectives of its setting.
The setting is a high-class tenement house. The story concerns all the people who live in it, but chiefly the Maurrants who give the other tenants cause for talk—derisive, frightened, sympathetic— on the dingy front stoop. Mr. Maurrant is a stage technician; his wife (Estelle Taylor) is having an affair with a bill collector. One day Maurrant comes home before he is expected, sees the shades pulled down in the window of his flat. He goes upstairs and shoots his wife and her lover. Police catch him in a cellar down the street. The Maurrants’ daughter (Sylvia Sidney) watches him taken to jail. She says good-bye to the young Jew (William Collier Jr.) who lives on the ground floor, packs her belongings in a suitcase, goes off down the street.
An exciting play of incident illuminated this story as it was told on the stage. The dark background of the house, squalid, heavy and forlorn, held it together and suggested that, in all other similar city houses, there might be similar stories, as there were surely similar incidents. The camera’s disadvantage lies in the fact that its lens is less efficient than the human eye: to show a head poked out of a second-story window, the camera must omit the group on the front stoop. When far enough away to show the whole house, it is too far away to show the people clearly. Like the play, the cinema enjoys the advantages of brilliant acting, especially that of Beulah Bondi as an Irish hag whose loose tongue, constantly wagging and whining, voices the obscene and tedious gospel of an utterly mean person.
Guilty Hands (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), as the title suggests, is a murder story. The guilty hands are Lionel Barrymore’s. He despatches an obnoxious roue who has become engaged to his daughter. The audience is agitated, not by the question of culpability which is early and clearly established, but in wondering what penalty will fall upon the murderer. His crime is justified; he has planned it carefully; but the roue’s mistress (Kay Francis) suspects Barrymore and finds evidence to justify her suspicions. It is necessary for Barrymore to explain to her with gestures, that he can manufacture a water-tight case against her unless she holds her tongue. Ably constructed, Guilty Hands is made into a murder story in the grand manner, a carnival of bad acts and good intentions, by Barrymore’s elaborate characterization.
Secrets of a Secretary (Paramount). Claudette Colhert is a social secretary this time, compelled to work for a living when her father dies without making adequate provision for her in his will and when her husband, an ill-tempered gigolo, angrily deserts her in disappointment at this turn of events. Her employer is the mother of a girl in her own set. Claudette Colbert is called upon to further preparations for the marriage of this girl to an English lord (Herbert Marshall)—preparations which become increasingly difficult as the girl takes up with the gigolo and Claudette falls in love with the lord. The demands upon a social secretary’s tact and loyalty become almost superhuman when the gigolo is shot by gangsters while the daughter of Claudette Colbert’s employer is in his rooms for no good reason.
Claudette goes to the room, changes clothes with the girl and endeavors to behave like a suspicious character in the interests of her employer. Her heroic ruse is discovered in time for an equable administration of poetic justice. Absurd and unlikely in synopsis, these happenings are the basis for a pleasing, if not an enthralling, program picture, mainly because of the charm and grace of Actress Colbert who has now, after this picture and Honor Among Lovers, established herself as the most efficient all around secretary on stage or screen. Good shot: the gigolo (Georges Metaxa) enraged when he learns his wife is poor, kicking his silk hat across the floor.
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