Cinema: The Garden of Allah

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(See front cover)

Color will be the cinema's prime problem for 1937. Last week the country's biggest cinemansion, New York's Radio City Music Hall, exhibited the best answer to the problem that Hollywood has made in 1936. It was The Garden of Allah, third cinema version of Robert Hichens' 1907 best seller, produced by Selznick International Pictures, Inc. in six months for $2,200,000. In full color, against a blazing background of North African (Arizona) and, The Garden of Allah, directed by Richard Boleslawski, exhibits Marlene Dietrich, Charles Boyer and an imposing supporting cast in a story whose most important feature is the moral: "You can't win."

Marlene Dietrich is a wealthy orphan named Domini Enfilden, who proposes to the Mother Superior of the convent where she was brought up a difficult question. "What," Domini asks, "am I to do?" "Go away . . . perhaps, to the desert," says the Mother Superior. This is bad advice. First person Domini meets in the desert is Boris Andtovsky (Charles Boyer), a renegade Trappist monk out to discover, after breaking his vow of lifelong silence, just what it is that makes the world go round. When he has scraped acquaintance with Domini in a night club, they go riding. Without telling her that the only job that he has ever held was that of liqueur cook in the monastery, Boris proposes marriage. Domini's elderly friend, Father Roubier, performs the ceremony.

Main thing Domini and Boris have in common, conveniently for Producer Selznick's cameras, is a wish to see the desert. They do it in a caravan whose manager is a bubbling young Algerian named Batouch (Joseph Schildkraut). Tripping about the North Sahara they enjoy life to the full until one night a French Army officer, lost with his troop, happens on their camp. When Batouch brings in a bottle of the Trappist liqueur Lagarnine, the officer remembers where he has met Boris before. Without so much as saying, "It's a small world after all," he goes off in a rage.

Next caller at the Androvsky tent is their mutual friend Count Anteoni (Basil Rathbone). He tells Domini what her husband is and she tells Boris that she knows his secret. For the next 20 minutes on the screen, Boris struggles with his lower nature. When last seen he is padding uphill to the monastery. Domini is driving off alone.

Sad, serene and somewhat silly, The Garden of Allah belongs to that dignified class of pictures which reviewers customarily praise for the music and photography. Unfortunately for Hollywood, cinemaddicts go to the theatre not to see the latest wonders of cinematography but to be entertained. That in this case both music, by Max Steiner, and color photography, by Cameraman W. Howard Greene and Color Designer Lansing C. Holden, are genuinely superb, will doubtless not suffice to interest 1936 in two young lovers who, with money to burn, can apparently find nothing better to do than brood about the life hereafter. If The Garden of Allah, best example of color photography the cinema has so far contrived, is a box-office hit, it will be because of its stars.