Cinema: The New Pictures: Mar. 16, 1931

Ten Cents a Dance (Columbia). Back of Hollywood's system of finding type-actors for certain parts and securing the same actors whenever these parts turn up is the theory that bit-part actors, like the stars, have their personal following. But this system has weaknesses, and Ten Cents a Dance suffers from the fact that Monroe Owsley happens now to be Cinema's outstanding cad. His chin is in favor for its weakness, his eye for its shiftiness. The common knowledge that Monroe Owsley is a cad gives away the plot. Last week he was a cad in Honor Among Lovers and, sure enough, Ten Cents a Dance has an identical story about two men in love with a girl, the rich young man decent and the poor young man (Owsley) dishonest and weak. The only difference between Honor Among Lovers and Ten Cents a Dance is that the latter is set against a dancehall background instead of the beau monde and that handsome Barbara Stanwyck is in it. Spectators know as soon as they see Owsley that Ricardo Cortez is going to get Miss Stanwyck in the end. But such spectators will not go home: Barbara Stanwyck will hold them. She makes the dialog — so jerky and stilted on the lips of the rest of the cast — sound as though it were superbly written. In the picture she has the same troubles as the girl in Rodgers & Hart's famed song, from which the title is taken:

Ten cents a dance, that's what they pay me,

Gosh how they weigh me down!

Ten cents a dance, pansies and rough guys,

Tough guys who tear my gown. . . .

For the sound device, less rhythmically, she exclaims: "I wish I could tie up that trumpeter and make a saxophone player play in his ears until he dies." Most expected shot: Owsley accusing Miss Stanwyck of infidelity after she has left the dance hall because he was jealous of the many men who danced with her.

Barbara Stanwyck is a 23-year-old Brooklyn girl who tried stenography and a telephone switchboard before she landed a chorus job on the Strand Roof. In a show called Keep Kool she did an imitation of the late Louis Wolheim in The Hairy Ape. She moved through the Follies and a few other musical shows before her first straight role in The Noose. In Burlesque she made theatrical history. Another of her current pictures, Illicit, is one of the year's best.

Kiki (United Artists). With decades in ringlets behind her, Mary Pickford has become a madcap. If she finds madcapping tiring at her age no one can tell from the results except that at times she seems to work a bit too hard at it. In The Taming of the Shrew, she was a madcap in costume, which was an advantage. In Coquette she had an hysterical scene which was widely applauded and made up for her routine madcapping. In Kiki the madcapping consists of losing her panties on the stage, reading other people's letters, using a hatpin as a dagger, wrestling with a butler, falling into a bass drum, and remaining, through it all, a Nice Girl. The story, which has been filmed before with Norma Talmadge and Ronald Colman, deals with a show girl in love with the manager of her show. The humor is mechanical and not really funny, but once more Mary Pickford's industry and a tested stage vehicle win out: Kiki is fair entertainment. Best shot: Kiki going into a cataleptic trance to keep the manager from throwing her out of his apartment.