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Charlie Chan at the Race Track (Twentieth Century-Fox) is the twelfth and one of the best assignments which that famed family man and sleuth, Charlie Chan (Warner Oland) has received from his home office, the Honolulu police headquarters. Outstanding question is whether Major Kent (George Irving) was accidentally kicked to death by his horse Avalanche, or just plain murdered. Developments include: 1) a crooked jockey who is also murdered; 2) gamblers who use an electric timing machine at the track to shoot a dart into the horse they wish to eliminate; 3) a rival owner whose horse, Gallant Lad, is switched with Avalanche. Chan unspins the web with his customary politeness, refusing to take advantage of his enemies, and talking his peculiar argot, minus all articles and most personal pronouns, and larded with proverbs like "Foolish rooster stick head in lawnmower, end up in stew."
The Road to Glory (Twentieth Century-Fox). Result of a Hollywood collaboration between Joel Sayre (Rackety Rax) and William Faulkner (Sanctuary), this war picture, which is not to be confused with Humphrey Cobb's war novel Paths of Glory, slyly differs in its point of view from most of its predecessors in the cinema's huge dossier on the subject. In and around a standard plot—rivalry between a lieutenant (Fredric March) and a captain (Warner Baxter) of French infantry for a hospital nurse (June Lang)— it presents the spectacle of fighting on the Western Front with definitely sadistic relish.
The night Lieutenant Denet goes up to the front with Captain La Roche's company for the first time, a wounded man is pinned on the barbed wire just in front of the trench. The captain ends with a well-aimed revolver bullet his subordinate's temptation to try a foolhardy rescue. The tick of underground shovels tells the company the Germans are laying a mine. They listen for five days, evacuate the trench, when replacements arrive, just in time to look back at the explosion. The next time Captain La Roche goes into the trenches, his father (Lionel Barrymore), a doddering veteran of 1870, has joined his company as a private. On a wiring expedition, the oldster's theatrical bravery curdles into panic which makes him throw a fatal hand grenade at his own sergeant (Gregory Ratoff). The slaughter continues until La Roche and his father have been blown to bits, leaving Denet to explain to the nurse that he will presently be obliterated also.
Neither patriotic poppycock nor pacifistic preachment, The Road to Glory is sure to enjoy a vast popularity which may be partly attributable to the fact that it can be mistaken for either. Actually, it is propaganda for nothing but the shrewdness of Producer Darryl Zanuck in arranging the daringly incongruous combination on such a theme of two authors whose respective specialties are caustic humor and energetic morbidity, and in giving Director Howard Hawks the best material he has had since The Crowd Roars. In The Road to Glory, June Lang, publicized as the possessor of a "modernistic figure," makes her debut as a leading lady, and Fredric March's performance, unlike those in the two other major pictures (Anthony Adverse, Mary of Scotland) in which he is currently on view, is thoroughly first-rate. Good shot: a French sergeant reading La Vie Parisienne.