Cinema: The New Pictures: Dec. 16, 1935

• Share

In Person (RKO), Ginger Rogers' first starring picture, presents her as an "agoraphobe."* A cinema star, she fears crowds as a result of having been mobbed during a personal appearance. Secluding herself with a psychiatrist, she goes out only at his urging, and then in heavy disguise. It is on one of her therapeutic excursions that Miss Rogers meets the nephew (George Brent) of a friend of the psychiatrist. After some involved negotiations, she accompanies Brent on his vacation at a mountain snuggery, the theory of all concerned being that in her ugly make-up the cinemactress would be safe with any man. Soon after Brent has seen her not only minus the disguise but minus most of her clothing. Miss Rogers begins to cure herself. Stung by Brent's superciliousness toward actresses, she takes him to see one of her pictures in a village cinema, makes an enthusiastic personal appearance before she realizes her phobia is gone. Remarkable sight: Miss Rogers in black wig, spectacles, false teeth, which make her so thoroughly unattractive that RKO's publicity department forebore to release "stills"' of her thus disguised.

Bar-20 Rides Again (Paramount) is the third in a series of six Westerns to be released at two-month intervals. Its hero, famed in cowboy lore, is Hopalong Cassidy, created and kept alive in a score of Western books by Clarence E. Mulford. In this one Cassidy (William Boyd) is summoned by Jim Arnold of the S V Ranch to clean up a gang of rustlers. Cassidy brings along Johnny Nelson and Red Connors of Bar-20, plays a lone hand himself. Posing as a Texas gambler, he finds the gang's hideout, discovers that its leader is a cold-eyed Easterner who has been paying attention to Jim Arnold's daughter. Fast, well photographed by Archie Stout, Bar-20 Rides Again is the best of its series (others: Hopalong Cassidy, Eagle's Brood), should prove eminently acceptable not only to U. S. youngsters but also to older folk who regard horse operas as topnotch entertainment. Second only to the works of Zane Grey, the Hopalong Cassidy series have sold 1,500,000 copies in the U. S., have been translated into German, Polish, Spanish, the Scandinavian. Clarence Edward Mulford published his first Western in 1907 when he was a city clerk in Borough Hall. Brooklyn. Seventeen years later he took his first trip West, to have a look at the locale he had been writing about. When, about six years ago, his royalties became sizable, Author Mulford bought a house in Fryeburg, Me., threw away his white shirts & collars, settled down to write and have fun. On the Trail of the Tumbling T last autumn made his 25th book.