The New Pictures: Mar. 25, 1935

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The story which these production numbers interrupt, more witty and ingenious than its predecessors, shows a pair of rascally theatrical entrepreneurs (Adolphe Menjou and Joe Cawthorn) engaged in fleecing a stingy dowager (Alice Brady) who hires them to produce a charity show on a shoestring. Dick Powell, Glenda Farrell, Frank McHugh, Hugh Herbert and Dorothy Dare appear in their usual capacities, help put the production on a grander scale than anything ever seen outside a Warner sound stage. Trick shot: an unidentified tap dancer's feet photographed from below, through a glass floor.

Princess O'Hara (Universal). When Old Man O'Hara, driver of a horse hack, is accidentally killed in a Manhattan taxi war, his daughter Princess (Jean Parker) blames Toledo (Chester Morris). The audience is rapidly made aware that Toledo has the golden heart traditional for mobsters in that blend of Hans Christian Andersen and Broadway which is a Damon Runyon story. Leon Errol and Vince Barnett are the gorillas detailed by their boss to see that life flows smoothly for the Princess, a task made difficult because she resents any benefactions sponsored by Toledo. Faced with the problem of getting her a new hack horse, they hire a professional horse thief from a Madison Square Garden rodeo. He is a desk cowboy with wild eyeballs who in the picture's most hilarious sequence steals the year's outstanding race horse, Gallant Godfrey. Things go on like this until the climax at the race track. Gallant Godfrey, returned to his owner, runs against Toledo's horse and makes everybody happy by losing.

Scenarists Doris Malloy and Harry Clork needed and used every trick of their trade to expand a fragment of atmospheric writing by Runyon into an agreeable full-length feature. The excellent Manhattan exteriors, including the Plaza Hotel and Central Park, are not glass process shots but well selected bits of San Francisco.

Liliom (Erich Pommer). This adaptation of Ferenc Molnar's famed play, with French dialog and English subtitles, is notable for two reasons. Its director was Fritz Lang (M, Metropolis). Its star is Charles Boyer, who, after a comparatively inconsequential sojourn in Hollywood, returned to France a year ago and promptly became its leading matinee idol.

As the raffish vagabond who considers it beneath his dignity to take a job as janitor and prefers to mistreat his mistress while she supports him, Boyer supplies precisely that mixture of cruelty and innocence which is required to make Liliom a sympathetic character. Director Lang's treatment of the story brings out the quality of rueful fantasy which Author Molnar put into the play and which was so notably absent from the U. S. screen version in which Charles Farrell appeared (TIME, Oct. 20, 1930). Characteristically imaginative is Lang's use of puppets—usually a detriment to any cinema—in the interlude which shows Liliom, after feebly attempting to commit first robbery and then suicide, visiting Heaven before he comes back to Earth to beg forgiveness of Julie (Madeleine Czeray).