Louie the 14th. Leon Errol's legs straddle this musical comedy like those of the Colossus at Rhodes. Florenz Ziegfeld's latest musical pageant and village carnival has been produced on a scale of towering magnificence. It outshines a Mardi Gras festival and the Follies combined. But unless the book had Mr. Errol's legs to uphold it, it could hardly stand on its own feet.
The tumbling Errol is the principal object of art in some extremely decorative snapshots of musical-comedy France. The comedian seems a bit less springy than formerly, for constant falls have not taken the jar off his spine. But he is as potent as ever in his tipsy dizziness, his skittish gallop. Beneath its bald dome, his elastic face is still fluent with its infantile grimaces.
His role is that of a dawdling cook, left behind in France after the armistice, who is bagged as the 14th guest at a gold-plate dinner of superstitious, rich Americans. He disrupts the party, in accepted operetta vein, with goofy behavior. Eventually he performs a rowdy dance with Ethel Shutta, the latter seeming, in looks and behavior, to be Nora Bayes stretched to the nth degree.
Another Errol specialty vouchsafed is the cluttered, fumbling attempt to gather an armful of packages. Ripe pantomimic art raises this above the level of the five-a-day variety. Mr. Errol's groping hands are beautifully pusillanimous.
The inescapable romantic element centers about Harry Fender, collar advertisement masquerading as a U. S. lieutenant. He loves Doris Patston, French flower-seller with an English accent. She is gracious, with a cool, reassuring voice, nimble limbs, modish good looks. The diligent Sigmund Romberg has drained off another resonant score to match his The Student Prince (TiME, Dec. 15). There is a military chorus to boom close harmony and rumble rifles. Florenz Ziegfeld has window-dressed the scenes far above the usual art-calendar level. The book has been only partially translated from the lumbering German. It would lose momentum but for Errol's hind legs.
Starlight. Nothing is more tempting to most actresses than to vibrate in the role of a celebrated actress, perfumed with a past. Nothing is more likely to bark the temperamental shins. Actresses' lives are admittedly artificial. To paint them up additionally with wire-strung acting is to paint the lily. So, when Doris Keane, in Gladys Unger's play, essayed a role faintly redolent of Bernhardt, she invited the lightning.
The sparks that it struck off were only feeble glints of starlight. From a Montmartre dive in girlhood to stage triumphs, Actress Aurelie Bourgevin (Miss Keane) runs the gamut of 100 emotions, 60 years, 14 costumes, several husbands. Harking back to Romance, she is allowed rapid shifts in mood and attire. Her laryngeal versatility is given scope by screaming in childbirth, yearning in bed and scrubbing her child in its bath tub. Her makeup, modeled after the Divine Sarah's, seems authentic. Sartorially it is striking, but dramatically its fine feathers droop.