Hear! Hear!
Moviegoers knew it. Hollywood knew it. Louis B. Mayer finally said it. Warning his moviemakers to find fresh replacements for the male actors who are fast being taken by the Army & Navy. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's head man admitted: "Audiences are tired of some of our old faces. They've been looking at them too long. . . ."
The New Pictures
The Gay Sisters (Warner) are a very unhappy trio of prospective million-heiresses: Barbara Stanwyck, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Nancy Coleman. Their mother went down with the Lusitania. Their father died on a World War I battlefield. They have passed the best part of 23 years in court trying to get a clear title to the half-billion dollars fate and father left them. The Gay Sisters chronicles this courtroom crisis straight through to the final gavel.
It is hard to say who is making it tougher for the girls, Warner Bros, or stubborn George Brent. Brent, a rich construction engineer, is the fly in the probate. He could settle everything, but won't because Sister Stanwyck, spokesman of the trio, won't sell him the family Fifth Avenue mansion which is blocking a kind of Rockefeller Center he's building. Stubborn Sister Stanwyck won't sell because her father told her not to. Besides, she was once secretly married to Brent—just long enough to collect a badly needed inheritance from her Aunt Sophronia and to bear Brent a child. Says Sister Fitzgerald when this truth comes out: "Oh, my darling spinster, how you've been had!"
Novelist Stephen Longstreet has a grudge against lawyers and wrote The Gay Sisters to say so. In his novel the lawyers made off with most of the sisters' estate. Warner Bros., with no grudge at all against lawyers, are constrained to angle the picture's villainies some other way. They do it by suggesting that there is something vaguely unholy about owning real estate. The result is a picture whose ponderous pointlessness may well have been foreseen by prescient Miss Stanwyck on the first day's shooting. Said she to Cinemactor Brent, as the cameras prepared to roll: "Well, here we go again."
United We Stand (20th Century-Fox) huffs & puffs at the jumbo job of stuffing 23 fat years (1919-42) of world history into seven lean reels of film. The purpose of this sausagery is to make clear to Americans how the 28 United Nations got together to fight the Axis. It is more likely to make them scratch their heads.
To provide the shots for United's 70-minute running time, a million feet of newsreel film was culled. Result is a hodgepodge of personalities and panjandrumry, from Woodrow Wilson and the Versailles Conference to Franklin Roosevelt and the U.S. declaration of war against the Axis. The film pulls out all the stops (Hitler, Germany's secret rearmament, Daladier, Chamberlain, Munich, the awesome wreckage of Pearl Harbor, etc.), without quite achieving a tune you can whistle.