The Adventures of Marco Polo (Samuel Goldwyn). This grotesquely cast Marco Polo skips like a cockleshell over the surface of Marco's famed Munchausenish travel tale, comes at length to a cockleshell's finale. With about as much relish for his task as a small boy's for his homework, lank, ingenuous Actor Gary Cooper dons Marco's 13th-Century raiment, crosses desert, sea & mountain only to find, in a remarkable conception of old Peking, George Barbier dressed up as Kublai Khan. Historically, Kublai Khan was China's strong man, who conquered all of China & ruled more subjects than he could count. Producer Goldwyn's Cathay is pretty thoroughly under the well-manicured thumb of Basil Rathbone, a saturnine, bewhiskered minister of state. And Producer Goldwyn's Marco Polo finds career enough for any Venetian in naïve, unkissed Princess Kukachin, with her wide-set eyes, parted, quivering lips, two-story hairdo.
Behind her rigging and wigging, Princess Kukachin is blonde, wide-mouthed Norwegian Sigrid Gurie, engaged by Producer Goldwyn with elaborate secrecy. Cinemaudiences may recognize her as the girl Gary Cooper taught to kiss in one four-minute cinema lesson, a sequence to go down in cinema history with the Garbo-Gilbert pacesetter (Flesh and the Devil) and the May Irwin-John C. Rice long count of 1896.
The most talked-up cinema in many a year, Marco Palo proves the contention popularly attributed to the oft-twisted Goldwyn tongue: that verbal promises are seldom worth the paper they are written on. Retired Cinemactor Douglas Fairbanks toyed with the idea three years ago, then passed it along to Producer Goldwyn. First loud stunt of the Goldwyn staff was to trumpet an invitation to young Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang, kidnapper of Chiang Kaishek, to lead Kublai Khan's cohorts. When Producer Goldwyn, who had discovered Actor Cooper over a decade before (The Winning of Barbara Worth), lured him back from Paramount to play Marco, Paramount helpfully hollered bloody murder, sued unsuccessfully for $5,000,000. When the astronomical Paramount suit sputtered out, the Goldwyn staff tried one more impertinent plug. They wired Egypt's Washington minister for "rates and conditions" for posting their bills on the Pyramids.
Mad About Music (Universal). Greatest asset of deficit-ridden Universal Pictures Co. Inc. is wholesome, rich-voiced, 16-year-old Deanna Durbin. When her first featured picture, Three Smart Girls, was started in 1936, Universal, newly taken over from Carl Laemmle Sr. by a syndicate headed by Banker John Cheever Cowdin, was $1,835,419.07 in the red as of Oct. 30. Three Smart Girls cost about $300,000, has thus far grossed almost $2,000,000. Six months ago Deanna's second film, 100 Men and a Girl, was released and immediately justified the added expenditure allowed for it. Last week Universal reported itself $750,000 nearer the black. Its deficit as of Oct. 30, 1937 was approximately the cost of Deanna's third film, Mad About Music.