(2 of 4)
Wintergreen loses the election, takes his wife (Lois Moran), Vice President Throttlebottom (Victor Moore) and his Cabinet into the shirt business with him in Manhattan. They make blue shirts. Times get worse. An agitator named Kruger, impersonated by that violent Comedian Philip Loeb, gives Wintergreen the notion of starting a Blue Shirt revolution when he leads a band of grimy Union Square radicals ("We Seldom Fill Our Stomics, But We're Full of Economics") in song: Down, down with the House of Morgan! We'll blow up the Roxy organ! Down with novelists like Zola! Down with pianists who play "Nola!". . . We will make all tyrants shiver. Down upon the Sewanee River! Happiness will fill our cup When everything is down that's up! With plenty of blue shirts already on hand, the revolution is not hard to start. In a quavering voice, Alexander Throttlebottom wins the support of the Union League Club by letting the members believe that the revolution is directed against the British. The jokes about France's War debt, the mental incompetence of voters, the uselessness of the Vice-Presidency,* which made Of Thee I Sing so amusing, are all reworked for Let 'em Eat Cake. They fall quite flat. So do George Gershwin's antiphonal choral numbers which have grown longer and more tedious' since he first used them in Strike Up the Band (1927). Brother Ira Gershwin's flair for writing silly repetitive lyrics no longer seems a sprightly burlesque of all lyric-writing. His lyrics often appear to be simply slovenly, lazy work. But Victor Moore is even funnier than he was in Of Thee I Sing. Dictator Wintergreen promises everybody cake when he gets to the Blue House. His successor promises caviar. When the counterrevolution takes place, Funnyman Moore saves himself from being guillotined and becomes President of the U. S. He promises pistachio ice cream.
The Green Bay Tree* (by Mordaunt Shairp; Jed Harris, producer) is an appallingly sharp study of a middle-aged Briton who does not like girls at all and his adopted son who does not like girls much. Ballyhooed as a daring exploration of male homosexuality, done boldly in London last January, it has been purged by Producer-Director Harris of its sexual psychopathy. Now it ostensibly embroiders only the spiritual dependence of an older man on a young man in his own sybaritic image, the boy's sensual dependence on the luxuries the older man supplies. James Dale plays an elderly feline exquisite with a soul of catgut; Laurence Olivier plays a fickle and selfish young toady with an hysteria never seen on the playing fields of Eton.