(2 of 3)
For Cinemactress Mae West, last week was possibly the liveliest she has experienced since she entered the cinema industry in 1932. The Hearst editorials she inspired, however useful they may have proved as publicity for Klondike Annie, were not intended to be laudatory. They were part of a sudden Hearst campaign against Miss West supposedly inspired by a slighting remark she was reported to have made about Cinemactress Marion Davies. While they ballyhooed the picture with angry editorials, Hearst papers paradoxically refused to carry paid advertising for it (see p. 61).
In Kansas City, Cinemactress West's Manager James Timony was asked to comment on her current bickering with Paramount about her contract. Said he: "Lubitsch thought in his Hitler way he could push her around. ... In the end she pushed him around. . . . After all. she was in the show business before he thought of being. . . ." On his way to Europe for a honeymoon. Director Ernst Lubitsch replied as impudently as possible: "Try to push her around? . . . She's much too heavy. ... Of course she was in show business before I was. She's older than I am." Director Lubitsch is 44.
In Manhattan Actor Frank Wallace, who last spring announced that he and Mae West were married in Milwaukee in 1911 and had never been divorced, re-opened his suit to prove it. Said Mae West: "Wait a minute, sweetheart—which Frank Wallace is it? There are three of them. ... I'm not married to him and I never was. . . ."
Give Us This Night* (Paramount) is three-quarters sheer melody. Its ballads are the most advanced light opera music yet composed for cinema, and it contains one scene of cinema's first original grand opera—a balcony scene from a work called Romeo & Juliet of which only a few skeleton scenes were ever written. All the music except a short interpolation from Il Trovatore was composed by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, whose Violanta and Dead City have been given at the Metropolitan and who arranged the Mendelssohn score for Warner Brothers' Midsummer Night's Dream.
Nine years ago in Vienna a stocky young tenor with wonderful teeth arched his stout chest into the high notes of a Korngold opera, The Miracle Of Heliane. Since then Jan Kiepura has risen to fame in European screen operettas.
This time he is a singing fisherman who throws an egg at Tenor Alan Mowbray because he does not like his voice. Hiding from the carabinièri under the terrace of a big house, he hears Gladys Swarthout rehearsing a scene from Romeo & Juliet. Next day when Kiepura is in jail because of the egg. Miss Swarthout brings a composer (Philip Merivale) to hear him sing. The composer inspires so much gratitude in Kiepura by giving him a job that Kiepura later leaves the company when he finds the composer is also in love with Miss Swarthout. The complications intervening until the curtain can fall on the Kiepura & Swarthout reunion, after a superb aria in Romeo & Juliet, are concerned with bringing him back, getting rid of the drunken self-worshipping tenor.
Strictly in the new technique for screen operettas, the plot is less a series of music cues than an ornamental bubble tossed on the Hood of song issuing from Kiepura and Swarthout. Best ballads: A Song Kissed the Sky, I Need to Say I Love You.