Cinema: The New Pictures: Feb. 22, 1937

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Head Over Heels in Love (Gaumont-British) represents a heroic attempt on the part of England's major cinema company to get out a genuine U. S.-type musical comedy without infringing upon strict British cinema-quota laws. For industry and ambition, the effort deserves top marks. The producers not only imported Hollywood Scenarist Dwight Taylor, U. S. Songwriters Mack Gordon & Harry Revel and Manhattan Actress Whitney Bourne, they even used a back stage plot about a cabaret entertainer who becomes a radio singer while her partner (Louis Borell) goes to Hollywood, laid the scene in Paris, dressed the star as much as possible like Eleanor Powell.

Unfortunately the British trait of muddling through is more effective in international politics than in light entertainment. Where Head Over Heels in Love differs most markedly from a U. S.-made musical comedy it is hard to say. Possibly it is just where its director, Sonnie Hale, felt surest that he was on the right track, as in the scene in which his wife, Jessie Matthews, sings something called Don't Give a Good Gosh Darn with an enthusiasm that betrays only too clearly her exhilaration at the thought that she must sound just like Ruby Keeler. Through the rest of the picture, Director Hale concentrates unhappily upon his wife's teeth, which are not her best points, instead of her legs, which are. Good songs : Lookin' Around Corners, May I Have the Next Romance With You.

Green Light (Warner). This adaptation of Lloyd C. Douglas' 1935 best-seller exhibits Errol Flynn, last seen in the uniform of a British lancer in The Charge of the Light Brigade, somewhat less advantageously swathed in the white tunic of a U. S. medico. He is Dr. Newell Paige, an irreligious but idealistic young surgeon who, when a patient dies because of a blunder by his superior, generously takes the blame. The daughter (Anita Louise) of the mishap's victim likes Dr. Paige at first sight, hates him when she suspects him of being responsible for her mother's death. When this situation has been straightened out by the surgical nurse (Margaret Lindsay) who was on the case, and when Dr. Paige has risked his life in a foolhardy experiment to find a spotted-fever serum, there is not much left of Green Light except the sediment of kindergarten metaphysics which gave the book its mass appeal. In the picture, this sediment is represented by Sir Cedric Hardwicke as Dean Harcourt, a strangely overwrought clergyman who, when the other characters come to him for counsel, expounds to them his naïve conception of human affairs. "I like to think of civilization as a parade," he observes, making the point that mass destiny is more important than the fate of the individual. Somewhere else among the Dean's motor-minded messages upon Good & Evil there occurs the traffic-signal metaphor that gives the work its title.