Waterloo Bridge (Universal) is a glum but manageable anecdote of prostitution and the War. The heroine, strolling on London's Waterloo Bridge, picks up the hero during the confusion of an air raid. He, a Canadian soldier, fails to perceive that she is a prostitute. She, because she is one, refuses to marry him. This situation could scarcely have had a cheerful resolution but the one the story gives it seems almost a conspiracy in woe. The soldier takes the girl to visit his mother and step father. She tells his mother what she is and runs away back to London. The soldier follows her. learns all about her from her landlady and, still eager to marry her, finds her again on Waterloo Bridge. They say good-bye in another convenient tur moil of Zeppelins and searchlights. The soldier sets off for the front. The girl, by lighting a cigaret, has herself destroyed by a bomb. Director James Whale, who made a fine picture of Journey's End, was faced by a harder job in Waterloo Bridge. The stage play by Robert Emmet Sherwood lent itself superbly to the manufacture of a third-rate cinematic tearjerker. Director Whale, perceiving that its sentimentalities would be more effective if they were subdued, disguised them carefully and was terse in scenes which might have been heavily dramatic. Director Whale is sup posed to be the quietest megaphone artist in Hollywood. A onetime playwright and stage director, he seldom interrupts his actors or leaves his chair to show them what to do. His sedentary technique must have been particularly practical for Waterloo Bridge since he had an expert cast whose major deficiency is no more im portant than a heterogeny of accents and, in one scene, the gingerly demeanor toward tennis rackets that is universal on stage and screen. The soldier (Kent Douglass) seems naif but not absurd; his stepfather (Frederick Kerr) is a magnificently deaf old gentleman whose grunts and questions are not only real but funny. Mae Clarke as the girl gives the best performance of her short but competent career. Forlorn but hardboiled, she remains plausible even when she has hysterics; in the scene with the soldier's mother, she is curt and sullen instead of pathetic when she says: "I wanted you to know I could have married him."
With Wanda Mansfield (now under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) and Barbara Stanwyck (who is now being sued for breach of contract by Columbia), Mae Clarke was once a dancer at the Manhattan Everglades Club. A table for three in Manhattan's Tavern restaurant was reserved for them daily. Cinemactress Clarke left the Everglades after a short appearance in The Noose to act in vaudeville. She married and divorced Vaudevillian Lew Brice, went to Hollywood two years ago. She lives with & supports her family which had financial difficulties when her father, a motion picture theatre organist, lost his job at the advent of the talkies.