(3 of 4)
Plot: to marry the girl he has chosen despite her being a veterinary surgeon, the boy needs the allowance which the older man craftily cuts off. For three months he leaves his benefactor and apparently achieves self-reliance with his fiancée, his real father and the prospect of a job. But at the first overture from the old sybarite, the boy admits to his girl that he has been working merely to pass the time until the old man got too lonely. From the boy's point of view the separation is a coquetry to force the old man into allowing him both bride and allowance. When the coquetry fails, he abjectly abandons fiancée, work and real father. The latter kills his son's "corrupter" and goes to the madhouse instead of the gallows. The boy inherits three houses, a butler and a fortune; his girl abandons him; and he girds himself to duplicate the life of the deceased. For backdrops Designer Robert Edmond Jones has made the author's point with one beautiful sybaritic apartment set and one British middleclass set, perfect with cotton flowers in a glass case, The Last Supper on the wall, 1880 furniture and a parasol top in the fenced fireplace.
As the boy's real father, an evangelist and reformed drunkard, famed O. P. Heggie is remarkably weak. Good scenes: the old sybarite listening to a 15-year-old phonograph record of the choirboy voice of his foster-son; the final scene in which the stage darkens on the young man, new-rich and alone, until only his lighted cigaret is visible and from the wall appears the smiling, luminous death-mask of his dead foster-father.
The Curtain Rises (by B. M. Kaye, produced by Morris Green and Frank McCoy). Until three years ago the cinema had a saccharine young actress named Jean Arthur who was a blond equivalent of Film Actress Mary Brian. After three false starts on Manhattan stages, she steps out now in The Curtain Rises, a thinly entertaining play with an old idea, and gives it warm life and momentary importance. A dowdy socialite girl (Miss Arthur) in love with an actor buys acting lessons from his understudy (Donald Foster) in order ultimately to play one kissing scene with the actor. The lessons make her lovely and self-assured. She falls in love with the understudy who honorably dissembles his own love until the final curtain. In the meantime the girl has triumphantly played the actor-proof kissing part of Juliet opposite the great actor when several people simultaneously fell ill.
Audiences believed in the shabby little story when the quiet, detached tutor began gently to explain to the stiff, prudish, squeaky-voiced spinster the arduous program of becoming an actress. She flinched when he took hold of her to teach her how to breathe properly, how to show a decent interest in her vis-à-vis. She brightened when she was shown in how many different ways an actor may close a door, depending on what is supposed to be on both sides of it. As the spinster, Miss Arthur is astonishingly unalluring. In her second-act renovation it is not difficult to believe that the tutor should idealize her handsome, sincere blonde face, her modest vitality and her peculiar knack of making her eyes seem to shine. Good scene: the tutor playing a love scene, pushing down the spinster's clenched arms between impassioned lines.