Cinema: The New Pictures Mar. 24, 1930

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Song O' My Heart (Fox). John McCormack's first picture, the second feature talkie to be made by a first-rate singer (Lawrence Tibbett's Rogue Song was the first) was directed by Frank Borzage, a director whose specialty it is to lay over his interiors and landscapes a film of sentiment much like the tearful coloring with which John McCormack colors his celebrated upper register. In his customary manner, Mr. Borzage uses up a lot of film exhibiting the Irish village whence sprang the great ballad singer, the hero of the story. It is a badly integrated, inconclusive little story of frustrated love, frankly just a vehicle for Tenor McCormack. He sings eleven songs. His voice records beautifully, the slight metallic timbre of the talking machine eliminating the saccharine that makes McCormack cloying in his natural state. Song O' My Heart will undoubtedly be the greatest movie of the year to people who like "I Hear You Calling Me" on the phonograph. Silliest shot: McCormack's truelove dying of a broken heart.

Such Men are Dangerous (Fox). A Sunday-supplement story, taking one of its angles from the disappearance of Belgian Tycoon Alfred Loewenstein from his plane two years ago, has a rich man pretending to be dead in order to assume a new identity. To humiliate his wife for not loving him the way he is, he wants to make her love him as somebody else. A surgeon changes him from a crook-shouldered, gross, bearded, bespectacled, wedge-nosed fellow, to a straight, handsome cineman—to the likeness in fact, of Warner Baxter, who plays the role in both guises. Elinor Glyn, ablest living fabricator of Sunday-supplement fiction, made it all up and did a job which, in spite of its puerile aspects, has possibilities as entertainment. What makes Suck Men Are Dangerous silly is not the plot, acting or direction, but the awful dialog, written by Ernest Vajda. Specimen lines:

The Heroine (sweetly): "The story of Cinderella will never grow old, will it?"

The Hero (awed): "I would not have expected a remark like that from you."

Typical shot: Baxter lifting a little boy up to collect a kiss from his wife—a kiss for which, at a society fair, he has bid 20,000 francs.