Cinema: The New Pictures: Feb. 9, 1931

(3 of 3)

The Bachelor Father (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). A bachelor, lonely in his old age, invites his illegitimate children of various nationalities to come and live with him. One of them—the one he feels is most like him—turns out to be not his daughter after all. Such components were all right when Belasco produced The Bachelor Father on Broadway but they offered a grave moral problem to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. That great organization rose brilliantly to the emergency, however; they changed the bachelor into a married man. The comedy has lost some of its pace, but the circumloquacious dialog has a certain wit and the whole pro: duction is filled with pretty scenery, pretty clothes. Marion Davies enjoys herself in a role that did not take much thought. Best sequences: the children remolding their father along modern lines.

The Royal Bed (Warner). They have been so careful with this that it is not funny at all. On the stage as The Queen's Husband, it was scintillating comedy, and since few liberties have been taken with Robert Sherwood's story it is hard to see why this elaborate photograph of a good play should be so dull. Lowell Sherman, the director, also acts the king who, bullied by his ministers and his wife, finds his only pleasure in cheating a little as he plays checkers with the palace flunkeys. When the Queen goes away and a revolution breaks out he sides with the people. By the end of the film he has thrown the dictator out, put the radical leader in his place, married the princess to the plumber. If Actor-Director Sherman had stuck to the mood of drawing-room satire in which the play was written he might have been successful; as it stands The Royal Bed falls to bits between Graustarkian romance, farce, and heavy-footed satire. Best shot: the Queen's reminiscences of her trip to the U. S.

Seas Beneath (Fox). Even spectators not qualified to pass on the accuracy of detail of the naval warfare shown here will have a strong suspicion that Director John Ford has romanticized. All the action is highly theatrical: a jumble of spywork, gunfire, carousal, submarine heroism, with some brilliant photography of sea-scenes. The photography is all that recommends it, for the dialog is inept and the story of the Mystery Ship sent out as decoy for a German submarine and the beautiful German spy who loves a U. S. officer but sees him kill her brother in the course of duty, gets laughs in the wrong places. There is no one of note in the cast. Best shot: sinking the U-172.

Going Wild (Warner). One of the most frightening experiences undergone by people who are learning to fly is "ground-fear"—the conviction that if they try to land the plane they will crack it up. In the case of Comic Joe E. Brown the conviction is not purely neurotic, for he has never flown before. He is a reporter who has been mistaken for a famed ace. Going Wild is a mildly amusing, derivative comedy whose laughs do not compensate for long stretches of dullness. Laura Lee is the girl. Best shot: the plane crashing while Brown and his sweetheart come down in a parachute.