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Under this once-over-lightly procedure, familiar to Cagney fans, Miss Davis comes as leapingly alive as if she had been stuck with a pin. As Glamor Girl Joan Winfield, she is boredly eloping with a noisome orchestra leader (Jack Carson) in Commercial Pilot Cagney's plane when her father (Eugene Pallette) makes a deal with the aviator to deliver his daughter unmarried.
Father promises to pay $10 a pound for Cagney's passenger, C.O.D. at Amarillo, Tex.—enough to pay the overdue installment on Cagney's plane.
Miss Davis discovers the plot and crashes the plane in Death Valley. Then, popping her eyes and chawing her unaccustomed role with obvious delight, she proceeds to give her abductor hell in an abandoned mining town until father, a justice of the peace, a sheriff, and a posse of reporters arrive. Cagney weighs his bride in while father waits, checkbook in hand. The bride weighs 118 lb. The plane is his.
Good sequence: Cagney, returning to hungry Bette Davis after finding his way out of the abandoned mine and wolfing a meal, coaxes her into repenting her glamor girl existence in the belief that they are fated to starve to death. They kiss. Instantly Bette bounds back and smacks him one. She has tasted the telltale mustard on his lips.
The Stars Look Down (I. Goldsmith-Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) has gathered dust on M.G.M.'s shelves for over a year. Why this British film has been kept in cold storage so long is best known to M.G.M. A cinemadaptation of Author A. J. Cronin's best-selling novel, it is a grueling, honest, effective tragedy, based on one of Great Britain's sorriest social spectacles: the coal mines of England, Scotland and Wales.
The story of Stars is brief and bitter. A young English coal miner (Michael Redgrave) digs his way to the university for an education that may lead to Parliament and opportunity to improve his. people's lot. Marriage with a beauteous young tart (Margaret Lockwood) blasts his career and sets him teaching school in his home town. Her infidelity nullifies the effect of his plea to an apathetic trade union to strike the mine before its greedy owners drown the miners in a worked-out coal seam. The miners drown.
Earnest moviegoers will find Stars a first-rate picture, ably directed by Britain's Carol Reed (Night Train). Its principals' performances are top-hole. So are the lively doings of a host of minor bit players. But most cinemaddicts will find Stars tough sledding. In its entire 99 minutes there is scarcely one lightsome moment.