All That Money Can Buy (RKO Radio) is what the Devil (Walter Huston) offers Jabez Stone (James Craig) for his soul. Beset by an unaccountable run of hard luck, the young New Hampshire farmer makes the hard bargain. For seven years (the term of his contract) he prospers. When his time is up, he begs Daniel Webster, the great Yankee lawyer (Edward Arnold), to save him. Daniel does—and how!
This synthetic U.S. folk tale, a triumphant Yankee version of Faust, was invented by Poet Stephen Vincent Benet (in a short story, The Demi and Daniel Webster). A ticklish job for adaptation to the screen, it has been handled with skill and good humor by Producer-Director William Dieterle (The Story of Louis Pasteur). All That Money Can Buy is definitely superior cinema.
Never in the annals of U.S. jurisprudence has there been such a trial as the Devil v. Jabez Stone. Presiding judge is the renowned Justice Hathorne, who hanged the Salem witches. On the jury sit twelve famed American dastards—among them Traitor Benedict Arnold; Simon Girty, who helped the Indians burn white settlers. The court, straight from Hell, is packed in favor of the plaintiff.
But Daniel Webster had to trick the Devil into having any trial at all. Webster: “I never heard of you claiming American citizenship.” Devil: “. . . Am I not spoken of, still, in every church in New England? . . .” Webster: “Then I stand on the Constitution! I demand a trial for my client!”
Before this prejudiced judge and jury, Webster begins to talk. He reminds the jurors that each made the same deal Jabez made. He tells them that an American can’t enjoy a souless America. He appeals to their patriotism: “Clean American air was in your lungs, and you breathed it deeply for it was free. … He concludes: “You are Americans all, you can’t be on his side. . . . Gentlemen of the jury, don’t let this country go to the Devil! . . .” The jury is won over.
Dieterle wisely lets Actor Arnold play Daniel Webster without trying to look like the great man. His Webster is not the violent Massachusetts statesman but a homely, gusty humanitarian. Jabez, his wife (Anne Shirley) and his mother (Jane Darwell) are first-rate as the kind of people who made New England “out of hard luck and codfish.”
Walter Huston plays the Devil with demoniacal glee. Disguised as Mr. Scratch, a quizzical Yankee trader with a duck hunter’s cap, bristly sideburns and stubble beard, he is a puckish tempter. Whether he is getting Daniel plastered, playing the bass drum in the village band, or spryly nibbling a carrot, he seems to be hugely enjoying his part. He is the kind of Devil most people would like to know.
Although Daniel bests him at the trial, it is Scratch who has the picture’s last word. Perched on a rail fence, full of the peach pie which Ma Stone baked especially for the victorious orator, he thumbs jauntily through his address book for a fresh victim. And the person he picks makes any audience gasp.
The Maltese Falcon (Warner) is frighteningly good evidence that the British (Alfred Hitchcock, Carol Reed, et al.) have no monopoly on the technique of making mystery films. A remake of Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled mystery, it is rich raw beef right off the U.S. range.
A passel of furtive folk vigorously committing homicide to get hold of a bejeweled statuette of a falcon may sound old-hat to present-day cinemagoers, but Director John Huston makes their melodramatic activities as immediate as a shot in a dark room. His characters keep close to Hammett’s originals, who in turn are so close to real life that what is constantly about to happen to them (and often does) becomes at times downright unbearable.
This dramatic suspense is heightened by some practically perfect performances by a slick cast. As sly Sam Spade, a hot-&-cold private detective who doesn’t bat an eye while committing the heroine (Mary Astor) he loves to the pen, Bad Man Humphrey Bogart gives the performance of his career. Close behind him is an aging (61), solid (280 lb.), crackerjack Broadway actor (Sydney Greenstreet) making his first movie a shivery success. Making a trio with this pair is slight, saccharine, sinister Peter Lorre, whose mere presence would turn a bedtime story macabre.
For the good job he did with the Falcon, the Brothers Warner have slipped John Marcellus Huston the rewarding assignment of directing the studio’s neurotic Bernhardt, Bette Davis, in her next picture. A son who does not much resemble his celebrated father, Actor Walter Huston (see p. 98), young (35) Huston not only directed Falcon but also wrote the script for it. Seldom has a new director made such a ten-strike on his first picture. Sometime actor, painter, prize fighter, Hollywood scenarist, Mexican Army cavalryman, John Huston accepted only a slight assist from his father in his new venture: as an unlisted bit player, Huston Sr., sieved with bullet holes, appears long enough to deliver the falcon to Sam Spade, mumble a word or two, and fall dead.
Author Hammett, 47, onetime Pinkerton detective, white-haired, and very thin, has not written a book since his memorable The Thin Man (1934). Since then, the once undisputed champion of U.S. crime-story writers has been scripting his thrillers for Hollywood. For a long, long time he has had his sixth book—now titled There Was a Young Man—under way. He swears it is almost finished. Queried about his whereabouts (now Manhattan), one of the author’s waggish friends quipped: “He’s sitting at the Beverly-Wilshire contemplating his novel.”
Smilin’ Through (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is a lachrymose, sticky, super-sentimental romance conceived and acted by Jane Cowl for the post-war U.S. of 1919. Cinematized, it was played by Norma Talmadge in 1922, by Norma Shearer in 1932. Its present revival differs from its predecessors in one respect: Technicolor.
Smilin’ through her teeth, redhaired, green-eyed, pink-cheeked Jeanette Mac-Donald, now a matronly 34, plays the dual role of Moony can, a 20th-Century damozel who is shot by a jilted swain (Gene Raymond) at her wedding to Brian Aherne, and Kathleen, the 20th-century ward of the aged bridegroom, who bitterly resents his ward’s falling in love with the American son (Mr. Raymond again) of the scoundrel who shot his bride.
This gossamer geewhillikin is played to the last teardrop against a pastoral background of acres of olde English sets. Occasionally Songbird MacDonald comes down to earth long enough to warble Smilin’ Through, Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes and other songs of long ago. She is in good voice. The same cannot be said of her husband, blond Gene Raymond, who acts as if he cannot make up his mind what century he is performing in.
As one Hollywood trade journal innocently summed the whole thing up: “There is nothing in either dialogue or situation that will cause showman or spectator embarrassment. . . .”
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