Stage Door (by George S. Kaufman & Edna Ferber; Sam H. Harris, producer). Having thoroughly extolled the pride and excitement of theatrical life when he and Edna Ferber wrote The Royal Family (1927), having thoroughly deflated the parvenu pretense of Hollywood when he and Moss Hart wrote Once in a Lifetime (1930), George Kaufman, collaborating with Miss Ferber again, is compelled to cover some fairly old ground in a fairly old way when he again fights the battle of the drama v. the cinema in Stage Door.
When Terry (Margaret Sullavan), the bravest little unemployed ingenue living at the shabby Foot-Lights Club, says that she would not go to Hollywood and have her art put up in a can like soup even for an ermine swimming pool, she is not bringing any fresh arguments to bear on the long-mooted question of superiority be tween stage and screen. And when her radical, playwriting friend (Richard Kendrick), having decided after a Broad way success to go West and write for and not about the masses, tells Terry that the theatre is an obsolete art form which is not equipped to keep its devotees' bodies or spirits alive, he has only echoed the standard rebuttal of an old debate.
Actress Sullavan, whose few metropolitan stage parts disclosed her as a young lady with a strained voice and a forced, girlish delivery, has not changed much in the three years she has been in Hollywood.
Her impersonation of a girl who at the last moment replaces a famed screen star, who for publicity purposes has condescended to return to show business for one dramatic appearance, suggests a parallel be tween art and life that is likely to confuse most spectators.
The drawbacks, however, need not seriously impede theatregoers looking for laughs. In Stage Door, as in any Kaufman-directed show, there is something funny going on most of the time, whether it be the saturnine reflections of a girl whose 15-year-old sister is said to be as innocent as Mata Hari, or an all too realistic Times Square bedroom scene in which Terry and her roommate shout good night to each other, blindfold themselves and attempt to go to sleep amid a roaring, flashing hell of metropolitan night life. Swing Your Lady (by Kenyon Nicholson & Charles Robinson; Milton Shubert, producer). In the training quarters of a large Greek wrestler named Joe Skopapoulos (John Alexander), a horseshoe is found hidden under the Skopapoulos pillow. "What's he keeping that for?" someone asks. "I don't know," says his small manager (Joe Laurie Jr.) wearily, "maybe he's saving up for a horse." The horseshoe later turns out to be an amatory memento from a huge lady blacksmith named Sadie (Hope Emerson).