Cinema: The New Pictures: Jan. 28, 1935

David Copperfield (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). David Copperfield as a child is Freddie Bartholomew. As a young man, he is Frank Lawton. Rubbing together his malevolent hands, twitching his sly nose as Uriah Heep is Roland Young. Mr. Wickfield, the lawyer whom Uriah tries hard to cheat, is Lewis Stone. An obscure actress named Jessie Ralph performs magnificently as Nurse Peggotty, who comforts David when his mother dies and cares for his household when he marries. As Peggotty's brother Dan, who sets out to avenge Little Emily when David's friend Steerforth betrays her, Lionel Barrymore wears the chin whiskers of a Yarmouth fisherman. David's widowed mother (Elizabeth Allen); Mr. Murdstone (Basil Rathbone) who marries her, frightens her to death and packs David off to earn his living; violent Aunt Betsey (Edna May Oliver), who befriends David and beats such visitors as ride donkeys to her Dover cottage; Mr. Dick (Lennox Pawle), her shrewd, erratic house guest who was always getting the head of King Charles I into his writings; Dora (Maureen O'Sullivan) who uses the account book for sketching and whose spaniel lives in a pagoda; Agnes (Madge Evans), whom David marries when Dora dies—all these and a dozen other great Dickensian characters live and move and have their being in this picture. Best of the lot, though, is Mr. Micawber, played by W. C. Fields, red-nosed, dazzled, grandiloquent and undespairing. It is Micawber, hounded by creditors but never for an instant quailing at their squalid naggings, who first protects young David Copperfield in London. It is Micawber whose fine denunciation of Uriah Heep brings David Copperfield finally to its conclusion.

In making David Copperfield, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer went to vast expense and trouble. Before assembling his cast, Producer David Selznick journeyed to England with Director George Cukor and Scenarist Howard Estabrook. They brought back Author Hugh Walpole, to add his famed name to Scenarist Estabrook's act briefly as the Vicar of Blunderstone in the film. Five hundred boys were tested for the part of David before little Freddie Bartholomew of Wiltshire, England was picked. The picture cost approximately $1,000,000 and took a year to make. The result of all this money and mind, time and talent is, in David Copperfield, an example of the cinema's ability to use one masterpiece to create another. As rich, uproarious, tragic and astonishing as its original, it falls short in only one department. Twice as long as an ordinary picture, it lasts only two hours and ten minutes.

The County Chairman (Fox). "Day after election," says Will Rogers to his impeccable young law partner, "people don't come around and say: 'Did you conduct your campaign clean and digni-fied?' They come around and say: 'Boy, did you win?' Now that's politics in a nutshell."

In The County Chairman, adapted from oldtime Slangster George Ade's play produced in 1903, Chairman Rogers makes his law partner a candidate for prosecuting attorney to oppose the pompous rascal who stole the woman Rogers loved in his youth. Complications arise from the fact that the Rogers candidate (Kent Taylor) loves the opponent's daughter (Evelyn Venable).