Strictly Dishonorable. In a speak-easy whose murals luridly depict the Bay of Naples, a gentle-spoken maid from Mississippi (Muriel Kirkland) is wooed in ripe Neapolitan style by a singer of the Italian nobility (Tullio Carminati). She scarcely objects, for she has just had an altercation with her boorish fiance from West Orange, N. J. (Louis Jean Heydt). Even though the Italian is so indelicate as to offer her a bed in his apartment over the saloon and boldly announces his intentions as "strictly dishonorable," she does not quail.
Upstairs a policeman enters (Edward J. McNamara). He has been sent by the indignant fiance, but is speedily pacified at the mention of liquors. Says the girl: "Why, policemen never drink, do they?" Says the bluecoat: "It just seems like never."
But when she has accepted her host's guest pajamas and is determined to accept his love, the girl falls to weeping. Thereupon the sympathetic tenor tucks her in bed with a large teddy bear, goes elsewhere for the night. In the morning his honorable proposal is accepted.
Superbly played, this saucy fairy tale by Preston Sturges is continuously gay. It is the season's first smash-hit, by a margin of one night over Rope's End (see below).
The Crooks' Convention. What would happen if all the criminals in the world were to become unionized and then go on strike ? Novelist-Playwright Arthur Somers Roche demonstrates in three tedious acts of satire, that virtue would no longer be laudable, police and newsmen would be jobless, numerous industries would totter. His answer is not remarkably trenchant, nor is his playwriting adept.
Rope's End. A malevolent scent pervades the theatre wherein this play is exhibited. Perhaps it really exists. More likely it is imaginary, for the audience observes such diseased events as render the senses unreliable. The play and its players have chilled London for several months with their tale of two Oxford undergraduates (Sebastian Shaw and Ivan Brandt) who divert themselves by strangling a happy classmate and serving dinner on the carven chest which contains his corpse. Among their guests are the father and aunt of the deceased. Also present is Rupert Cadell (Ernest Milton), a cynical, orchidaceous poet whose lurching gait, acquired in the War, is misshapen, horrible.
While he invents witty fantasies on the evening's conversation, Cadell senses the macabre truth behind the feast. He leaves with the other guests. But he returns, sinister and languid, to toy with the nerves of both murderers and audience until he chooses to reveal and confirm his suspicions. One of the slayers is then prostrated with fright. Holding the other at bay with a sword cane, Cadell shrills a police whistle as the curtain falls.
Playwright Patrick Hamilton denies that he was influenced by the history of Leopold and Loeb, acknowledges a debt to Thomas De Quincey's essay "Murder as a Fine Art." The source is immaterial -this crescendo of fear depends on neither history nor scholarship. Mr. Hamilton, like Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, is an artist who makes diabolical fiction seem as real as sticks and stones.