The Man Who Came to Dinner (Warner) continues the glorification of that rococo personality, Monty Woolley—known to his friends as "The Beard." As Lecturer Sheridan Whiteside, of George S. Kaufman's and Moss Hart's cutthroat comedy (TMWCTD), Actor Woolley merely transfers to celluloid, for the exquisite benefit of cinemaddicts and posterity, the unexpurgated version of Alexander Woollcott which he played for two years on Broadway. The switch from Broadway to Hollywood is scarcely noticeable.
As almost everyone knows by now, TMWCTD is the tale of a famous crosscountry lecturer who is forced to go to a dull dinner party in Mesalia, Ohio, injures a hip on his hosts' icy steps, and has to stay for weeks. The part, originally created for Woollcott himself, has by this time become at least half Woolley.
Encased in a wheel chair, the egomaniacal, asp-tongued celebrity commandeers the household, forces his hosts to use only the upstairs, runs up a $784 phone bill conversing with all points of the compass, tries to smash his secretary's (Bette Davis) love affair, persuades his hosts' children to run away from home.
The mischief-making despot fills the house with Chinese, penguins, an octopus, a mummy case, etc. He informs his nurse that she "has the touch of a love-starved cobra" regards his physician as the "greatest living argument for mercy killing"; warns his favorite wayward actress (Ann Sheridan), who arrives to pay her respects, not to "try to pull the bedclothes over my eyes"; dismisses his secretary as a "flea-bitten Cleopatra."
Although there is hardly room for the rest of the cast to sandwich in much of a performance between this fattest of fat parts, Bette Davis, hair up, neuroses gone, is excellent as Woolley's lovesick secretary. Miss Sheridan, without benefit of any noticeable direction, looks as lovely, acts as badly as usual. Jimmy Durante, as himself; Billie Burke and Grant Mitchell, as the insulted and injured hosts; Reginald Gardiner, as Noel Coward, are tops.
But TMWCTD is now so much the possession of Monty Woolley that even its authors' right to a share in it seems questionable. Possessor of the most Edwardian visage of his era, bon vivant, trust-funder, darling of Manhattan's cafe society, onetime Yale English instructor, 53-year-old Actor Woolley plays Sheridan Whiteside with such vast authority and competence that it is difficult to imagine anyone else attempting it. As one of his intimates has remarked: "At last the old party has got the role he's been rehearsing for all his life."
The Shanghai Gesture (Pressburger; United Artists) is a film perversion of Playwright John Colton's flaming melodrama of 16 years ago. Most of its original bawdy plot, language, atmosphere and characterization has been removed. Mother Goddam (Florence Reed in the stage version) is now Mother Gin Sling (Ona Munson), no longer proprietress of a Chinese bawdy house, but of a gambling casino. As such, she is not sinister but gaudy. So is the pretentious picture.