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To intelligent cinemaddicts, it will be no great shock to learn that the best actors currently functioning in the U. S. act the play as well as it can be acted; that the most expensive sets ever used for Romeo and Juliet are by far the most realistic and hence the most satisfactory; and that the camera—which can see Juliet as Romeo saw her and vice versa—greatly facilitates the story. As for the play itself, which is by far the best part of the production, it remains what it has always been, the best version ever written of Hollywood's favorite theme, Boy Meets Girl.
China Clipper (Warner). After frequent appearances on the screen as a mere prop, TIME makes its debut in this picture as a story-telling device. When Dave Logan (Pat O'Brien), inspired by the Lindbergh flight, has launched a mail and passenger air service in the Caribbean, a facsimile of TIME'S Transport section appears on the screen. Under it, an inadequate little story vaguely titled, "Air" relates that Dave Logan and his Trans-Ocean Airline are doing well.
The rest of China Clipper is told by more conventional methods. Logan, his chief designer (H. B. Walthall) and two young pilots (Humphrey Bogart, Ross Alexander) put Trans-Ocean through an expansion program based on that, in real life, of Pan American Airways. Logan's wife (Beverly Roberts) leaves him at the start of the picture, returns at its conclusion. If the eventual launching of the China Clipper, and the hopeful, closing incident of a transpacific passenger flight lack verisimilitude, it is not due to any stint of zooming airplane motors, interior sequences in Alameda Airport, shots of the Clipper battling a storm. It is merely because cinema producers have not yet absorbed the lesson that fact is sometimes more salable than fiction and that to present a story like the rise of Pan American Airways in fictional form is not to increase but to destroy its impact, which is that it happened. China Clipper is to the real story of Pan American much as the facsimile TIME squib is to the story which actually ran on Pan American's Juan Terry Trippe (TIME, July 31, 1933).*
*First cinema production of Romeo and Juliet was shown in October 1916, with Francis N. Bushman and Beverly Bayne. Few days later Producer William Fox released another, which contained 411 scenes, 2,500 extras, a cast headed by Harry Milliard and Theda Bara.
*To be published next week is Skyway to Asia (Longmans, Green, $2.50) in which Pan American's William Stephen Grooch tells how he established stations for the Clipper at Honolulu, Midway, Guam and Wake Islands.