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Shrewdly timed to touch obliquely on current Jew-baitings in Germany and mishaps on the stock exchange, The House of Rothschild is an historical picture in the grand manner, conducted with splendid energy and style. "Dignity" is what old Mayer Amschel Rothschild advises his sons to acquire. The picture, like Nathan Rothschild, is dignified without being stupid. As squealing little Julie Rothschild, Loretta Young manages to be gay without appearing to have stepped into pro-Victorian England out of a Ziegfeld chorus. C. Aubrey Smith is excellent as Wellington. As old Mrs. Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who gets the wittiest lines Nunnally Johnson was able to pack into his script, Helen Westley is superb. Called upon to explain why she has lived so long, she answers, with a muddled sense of finance, by saying: "Why should God take me at 88 when He can get me at 100?" George Arliss has been playing another Jew. Disraeli, for so long and under so many names, that he cannot step completely and instantly out of his most famed role. His hauteur, his bandy-legged walk, his hawk nose and his sloping shoulders suit a proud, gererous, clever banker even better than they do a British prime minister. After this picture the chances are even that most cinemaddicts will think of him in terms of Rothschild rather than of Disraeli.
When, three weeks ago, a British court awarded Russian Princess Youssoupov $126,800 on the ground that the cinema Rasputin libeled her, it opened Hollywood's eyes to a vista of disastrous possibilities. If superior courts uphold her claim, all the connections or descendants of famed characters in all the historical pictures, which are currently the cinema's most profitable fashion, might sue for damages. But the Rothschild descendants who are today one of Europe's most potent banking families are not likely to drag Producer Zanuck into court. Although the picture treats the founder of the dynasty harshly and makes Nathan a sentimental parvenu, its general temper is complimentary and its continuity closer to fact than most efforts of its kind.
The founder of the House of Rothschild was 'Mayer Amschel, son of Amschel Moses Bauer. He was a dealer in coins, curios and jewels. The earliest Rothschilds lived in a double house in Frankfort's Jew Street. They took their name from a red shield which hung outside their part of the house. On the same street, behind the sign of a ship, lived the ancestors of the late great Jacob Schiff whose grandson was last week engaged to a daughter of the great gentile banking house of Baker (see p. 60). The Rothschild invention of branch banking was not made by Amschel on his death bed. It evolved when Nathan, ablest of Mayer's sons, set out for England to seek his fortune, wrote home for more money to buy goods.