(See front cover)
Properly speaking, the cinema does not possess a "season." Unlike legitimate theatres, the 14,000 cinemansions in the U. S. aim to keep their doors open at all times. Nonetheless, partly because it coincides with the actual release of the first pictures on the production schedules announced each June, the first half of August is generally regarded as the start of a new year in the cinema business. Last week half a dozen major pictures, in sharp distinction to the products from the bottom of last year's barrel which have been unloaded on exhibitors for the past two months, were ready for the screen.
This week Paramount will release Cecil B. DeMille's The Crusades; RKO will exhibit Alice Adams, starring Katharine Hepburn. Within the next month will appear Greta Garbo in Anna Karenina, Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers in Top Hat, Will Rogers in Steamboat Round the Bend, Marion Davies in Page Miss Glory. Last week the first "superspecial" picture of the new season enjoyed its premiere in Manhattan. This—advertised on billboards all over the U. S. for the past two months, starring Jean Harlow, Clark Gable & Wallace Beery, produced at a cost of $1,000,000—was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's China Seas.
China Seas, like an alarmingly large proportion of the cinemelodramas which have been produced in the U. S. since Grand Hotel, includes no change of scene. All the action takes place on, in or near a steamship called the Kin Lung, bound from Hongkong to Singapore. Experienced cinemaddicts need not be told who is on board the Kin Lung. It is the same hardy little group of characters who have been regularly encountered in railroad depots, country inns, trains, cross-country buses and every other public place except a comfort station for the past four years: the bad girl with the heart of gold; the dipsomaniac writer; the hero pining for his lost love who makes her appearance in time's nick; the shady financier; the cuckold with his wife and her dishonest lover and all the rest. However, in China Seas this familiar crew has a new and entertaining bag of tricks to display.
China Doll (Jean Harlow), in defiance of the Legion of Decency, has apparently been the mistress of Captain Gaskell (Clark Gable) for six years. James MacArdle (Wallace Beery) is not a tycoon but a greasy, coastwise racketeer, aware that the Kin Lung carries a fat cargo of gold. McCaleb, the drunken novelist (Robert Benchley), insults his fellow passengers by misunderstanding them completely. High point of the story arrives when, having weathered a typhoon, the Kin Lung is attacked by Malay pirates who are in league with Racketeer MacArdle.