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Careful program-perusers noted (among the credits for Mr. Jessel's clothes, etc.) this thank-you: "Soldiers in the second act, veterans of A. E. F., supplied through courtesy of U. S. Veterans' Bureau."
Jarnegan. To Hollywood, the "bums' paradise," where there is "a pushover on every corner," comes Jack Jarnegan, a crude and noisy dynamo, full of boxcar bombast. Soon he is a director of cinemasterpieces. He confesses that on his arrival in the loud metropolis he slept in a flop house in company with other tramps; now, on the contrary, he has a fine house where there are eleven bedrooms and a Jane in every one. Richard Bennett plays Jarnegan with guttural roars, hob-nails, stubble-beard and a chest expansion. All this is profane and exciting.
Jarnegan is successful with the loose ladies of Los Angeles but there is one, a demure 16-year-old with "something in her eyes," whom he wished only to make into a star. When she dies of the effects of an operation, Jarnegan grows furious. He visits the mansion where an executive is giving a party; here, he states convincingly that the executive is a murderer, that the mother of a celebrity runs "a two-dollar house in Seattle"; then he shakes the rival director who has defiled the 16-year-old star. This is also profane and exciting.
Jarnegan is then a profane and exciting melodrama, though one which retains, despite the severe directorial auspices of George Abbott, many touches of Jim Tully's soapy sentimentality. Richard Bennett does most of the acting; Joan Bennett, his daughter and the sister of famed Constance Bennett, is beautiful and well cast as the 16-year-old unfortunate. The truest thing in Jarnegan is the performance, provided by Wynne Gibson, of a dipsomaniac star arriving at the peak of her intoxication; hearing noises in the night, she surmises that the owls are after her; with puzzled insolence she abuses an extra girl and wraps herself wildly in a black lace shawl.