Cinema: Musicomedies of the Week

In the current revival of cinemas with music, Warner Brothers, who claim that they started the cycle with 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933, favor backstage romances, staged with super-Ziegfeldian extravagance. Samuel Goldwyn surrounds Eddie Cantor with girls and animals. Universal, sceptical of the new vogue, was last week completing a cheap ($100,000) cinemusicomedy, partly financed by two Manhattan shoestring producers and produced at Paramount's Long Island lot, which has been disused for two years.

Trend toward cinemas with music was indicated by two which opened last week:

College Humor (Paramount) is a frantic little absurdity about an institution called Midwest (football rival: Yarwood) where Jack Oakie is the dormitory dunce, Lona Andre the campus belle, Richard Aden a neurotic footballer, and Bing Crosby the professor of music. With that inappropriate calm which is his chief distinction, Crosby yodels songs called "Learn to Croon," "Play Ball," "Moon-struck," ''The Old Ox Road." Paramount, more versatile than its competitors, has two types of musical pictures. Those in which Maurice Chevalier is directed by Ernst Lubitsch are for metropolitan consumption. The others, of which this is a fair sample, contain as many radio clowns and crooners as possible, are intended to delight rural cinemaddicts whose tastes in diversion have been shaped by wireless. Thus, College Humor contains George Burns and Gracie Allen.

Melody Cruise, RKO's first musical production, is built around Charles Ruggles— an expert comedian but no singer—in the character of a gentle bon vivant with a perpetual case of jitters. He embarks from Manhattan to San Francisco, has his trip made hideous by two chorus girls whom he discovers in his room after the ship has sailed. The main liabilities of Melody Cruise are the performers technically called "juveniles"—Phil Harris, who sings well but looks like Harry Richman with curvature of the nose, and Helen Mack. There are two pleasing songs,—''He Isn't the Marrying Kind" and "Isn't This a Night for Love"—attractive shipboard interiors, and photographic novelties like a shot of the sky with stars assembling themselves into a bar of music. Comment by Mordaunt Hall, onetime British Army officer who writes astonished cinema reviews for the New York Times: "One might hazard that it is a film in which the wizardry of the camera 'is the thing.' "

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