(2 of 2)
These two tried-&-true shows, excellent by themselves, together make up a sapless hybrid. Particular stumbling block is The Guardsman's plot: the predicament of an actor who, to satisfy his wife's yearning for amorous adventure and to satisfy himself that she is faithful to him, dresses up in the uniform of a guardsman and tries, hoping he will fail, to cuckold himself. The demands of this ticklish situation (used by M.G.M. with minor changes) are simply beyond the histrionic capacities of the picture's two principals: wholesome, husky Risöe (rhymes with Pisa) Stevens, young (28) Metropolitan Opera demidiva, and dimpled, impassive Nelson Eddy, 40, who looks like a Midwest swimming coach.
Although the operatic baritone and the contralto (whose first cinemappearance is, nevertheless, impressive) handle the skittish libretto like a pair of pouter pigeons, they are quite at home in their singing roles. The Straus melodies (My Hero, Sympathy, the title song, etc.), written originally for a lyric soprano and a tenor, have been rearranged and somewhat streamlined. Better are some of the picture's other tunes, Moussorgsky's Song Of The Flea (courtesy of Mr. Eddy), Saint-Saens' My Heart at Thy Sweet Voice (Miss Stevens), and Wagner's Evening Star (duet).
The music doesn't fit the plot, and vice versa. The fun of The Guardsman was that the audience never found out whether or not the wife knew it was her husband all the time. M.G.M. makes it painfully clear that she knows it before the picture is half over. The lilt of the Straus score fails to come through the wayward story.
As one M.G.M. publicist put it: "Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer has been very generous on this picture—really two shows in one. . . ."
The Men In Her Life (Columbia) is unfair to luscious Loretta Young. It requires her to be "a bundle of muscles and a smile." Soft-voiced, convent-schooled Miss Young, now 28 and a veteran cinemactress, can supply the smile but not the muscles.
Cast as Europe's ace ballerina (one Lina Varsavina), Loretta limps bravely through one dying-swan triumph after another. She neither looks, acts nor walks like a ballerina, but in sequences which permit her to be more or less herself she performs ably.
The men in Varsavina's life give her no end of trouble. They are three: Stanislas Rosing (Conrad Veidt), who snatches her from a circus, makes her a great dancer, marries her, dies; Roger Chevis (John Shepperd), who dies before he can marry her; and David Gibson (Dean Jagger), rich U.S. shipbuilder, who marries her but lives to tell the tale.
The Men In Her Life (taken from Lady Eleanor Smith's novel, Ballerina) was originally scheduled as a picture for Vera Zorina, whose ballet-conditioned muscles (plus a more inspired script) might have made something out of this old-world period piece. As it is, the picture takes a long time saying that the lot of a ballerina is indeed tough.