With Byrd at the South Pole (Paramount). No matter what the scientific value of the Byrd expedition, there is no doubting the fact that Byrd's two photographers, Joseph Rucker and Willard Van der Veer, did some epic work. They show you clearly what an exploration party is like: men dealing minutely with a great isolation, making laborious preparations against hypothetical crises, living every day so as to come a step nearer an illusory goal. Pushing past the Ross Barrier (wall of ice guarding Antarctica) to and over the Queen Maude Mountains, Byrd and his men moved to the Pole step by step, laying out emergency bases, foreseeing, taking precautions. Byrd might have taken a chance and made a dash for the Pole by plane the day he got to Little America, but explorers need not be gamblers; Byrd caught the South Pole in a net of arithmetical detail. When the base-ship went back to warmer water, the camp on the ice-desert became a little city. You see the city live its life—dealing with whales, ice deserts, seals, penguins, wireless communications. The trip over the Pole itself is exciting in spite of a dreary monolog of explanatory comments by Floyd Gibbons, inserted in the U. S. Only silly shot: the opening sequence, with Byrd in a starched white uniform posed at his wheel, to explain why he went South. Epic shots: a school of killer whales lunging up for air; the ice-clad City of New York silhouetted against Ross Barrier; the Stars & Stripes, propelled by a stone from Floyd Bennett's grave, fluttering down from Byrd's plane to the South Pole.
The Social Lion (Paramount) No particular wit of dialog or situation makes this picture sparkle, yet it sparkles; its story is unremarkable, yet continuously entertaining. It concerns a prizefighter who loses an important fight because he takes seriously an opponent who tells him his shoe is untied. Later, having returned to his original profession of spark-plug cleaning, he plays polo for his home-town team and makes love to a society girl. Jack Oakie performs these activities with the necessary absurdity, and with wonderfully skillful, probably unconscious character reading. Like all true comedians, his fooling is human and remotely pathetic. Typical shot : Oakie composing a song to sing to his society sweetheart and then finding that she has only been encouraging him to get a laugh.
Jack Oakie (Lewis Delaney Offield) was born in Sedalia, Mo. His Scotch mother was a schoolteacher; his Irish father was in the hay business. The family moved to Manhattan and Oakie went to school at De La Salle High, left school to be a telephone clerk for a brokerage house, left brokerage to be a chorus boy in Innocent Eyes. He took funny bit-parts in several revues, then went to Hollywood with a letter of introduction to Wesley Ruggles who cast him for nothing much in Finders Keepers. Critics picked him out, Paramount put him on contract, recently made him a star. At parties he does imitations of Maurice Chevalier and Al Jolson. He is parsimonious, reads hardly anything, drives a Ford, is afraid of cross-eyed people and hearses. In Hollywood he walks around in corduroy pants, a sweat shirt, house slippers.