Theatre & Cinema

If acts can work four or five shows a day there is no reason why a reviewer can’t make the same number of shows. With this resolve firmly in mind old Freddie spent the afternoon and evening dashing around Broadway from picture house to cinema palace. The results-a slight tingling in the ears, running eyes and a strange idea of how humans act in dramatic situations. as for the pictures seen !

“FOUR FRIGHTENED PEOPLE”_This is Cecil B. DeMille’s latest which is showing at the Paramount. It tells in typical Hollywood fashion the strange adventures of four people who fleeing from a ship upon which a plague has descended go off into the Malaysian jungle. There they meet up with savages, beasts, murder and sundry other experiences. Away from civilization the veneer is off and you are regaled with nature in the raw. Claudette Colbert plays the lead and is supported by Herbert Marshall, Mary Boland and William Gargan. It is an amusing, slightly melodramtic film not without entertainment value.

“AS HUSBANDS GO” at the Radio City Music Hall is an adptation of the play Rachel Crother and although the picturization is not as convincing as the play it is still a better than average film. Comedy is the dominating note and the cast headed by Warmer Baxter and Catharine Doucet take full advantage of the possibilities. You will remember that the story deals with the plight of two American women abroad who fall in love with two foreiners.

“BELOVED” is the new musical romance starring John Boles and Gloria Stuart which is now being ground out at the Roxy. Four generations of the Hausmann family supply the motivation for this somewhat too lengthy often tiresome film. The story concerns a Viennese composer who comes to America in 1848, serves through the Civil War, marries and settles down in New York to raise a family. The rest of the picture shows what happens to his descendants. His son, a rake of parts, is killed in the Spanish American War. His grandson, who has musical talents, fritters it away in Tin Pan Alley and the old man finally finds happiness when a symphony orchestra plays his composition. The music is pleasant, the acting competent, but whole affair suffers from an overabundance of movie sentiment.

“THE WOMEN IN HIS LIFE” is an inferior story that even cast conisting of such talented players as Otto Kruger, Una Merkel, and Roscoe Karns couldn’t save. As far as I could determine, it is about a lawyer who drinks and his clients who get into all sorts of trouble, one of them being saved in the knick of time, from the electric chair. The picture is a fine example of how melodramatic a Hollywood company can become when they really set minds to it.

THEATRE NOTES

Milton Herbert Gropper and Ernst Truex have combined forces to present Mr. Gropper’s latest comedy, entitle “Sing and Whistle”, originally called “When Ghosts Meet” Mr. Truex heads the cast which includes Sylvia Fields, Brian Dunleavy and Dorothy Mathews. The play is now in rehearsal under the direction of Mr. Truex. and is scheduled for an early February at a Broadway theatre to be announced later. Mr. Gropper is the author of such successes of past seasons as “New New Toys”, “Ladies of the Evening”, and “We Americans”. Mr. Gropper recntly returned from California, where he was engaged in writing secnarios for talking pictures.

“Theodora, the Queen” a new play by Jo Milward and J. Kerby Hawks will open at the Forest Theatre Wednesday evening, January 31st. The cast includes Elena Mairamova, Minor Watson, Lina Abarbarnell and Horace Braham. Jo Graham staged the play, which tells the story of the love of Theodora a courtesan of Byzantium and Jusi tinian, Empeoror of Rome and Comstantinople.

Edward Laurlillard, London the atrical producer, now visiting the United States, with the object of arraging for American plays for London presenattion, is negotiating with Lee Schubert, for a London showing of the Ziefeld Follies, now current at the Winter Graden.