Cinema: The New Pictures: Oct. 7, 1935

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Here's to Romance (Fox). This picture violates the accepted technique of cinemas about opera singers. Instead of discreetly presenting short pieces of music at climactic moments, it pours out superb tenor singing in a flood interrupted only at intervals, and not seriously, by patches of story; scatters brief festoons, long streamers and big solid chunks of song as prodigally as if it were the purpose of Producer Jesse Lasky and Singer Nino Martini to exhaust the world's supply of tenor music. True, Martini, after a few scales, goes into a popular piece Here's To Romance by Conn Conrad, but then he warms to this work. He sings Le Reve from Manon Lescaut, parts of Cavalier ia Rusticana, and Leoncavallo's Mattinata. He throws in two more popular pieces Midnight in Paris and I Carry You in My Pocket but soon comes up with Vesti la Giubba, and then rises to E lucevan le stelle in Tosca at the Metropolitan. Madam Ernestine Schumann-Heink inter polates Brahms's Lullaby, and Dancers Maria Gambarelli and Vincente Escudero do their specialties.

Genevieve Tobin and Reginald Denny are a rich couple who find patronage of the arts a convenient avenue to amorous adventure. Denny promotes Gambarelli. Tubin, to get even, sends Martini to study song in Paris. By the time she joins him here his tendency to regard their friend ship as platonic is fortified by his interest in a dance pupil, Anita Louise. He does not know that his debut at the Opera-Comique has only been made possible because Tobin bought out the house later finds this is so, and fails in his perform ance. He is back in the U. S. when Miss Louise starts him to fame again by bringing the director of the Metropolitan Opera Company to the 5¢ & 10¢ store where he is plugging songs. By the time he finds his way to Miss Louise's arms it appears certain that Martini has established himself as the screen's No. 1 tenor just as certainly as Grace Moore is its soprano and Lawrence Tibbett its baritone. What producers will do in the future for material to satisfy the public's new hunger for classic singing remains vague but pictures like Here's To Romance make it seem likely that before long the cinema, if only by exhausting the supply of arias, will create its own grand opera.