Cinema: The New Pictures: Aug. 16, 1937

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You Can't Have Everything (Twentieth Century-Fox) was interesting to the Hays Office chiefly as the debut of Cinemactress Louise Hovick, who was Stripper Gypsy Rose Lee before Manhattan's burlesque theatres were abruptly curtailed last spring. Disguised under several changes of expensive wraps, Miss Hovick stalks innocuously through You Can't Have Everything without appreciably altering its merits as a smart and tuneful musical, cut from the same unpretentious pattern as its predecessors in Producer Darryl Zanuck's recent musical cycle (Sing Baby Sing, Pigskin Parade, One in a Million, On the Avenue, Wake Up and Live).

The story, credited to Comedian Gregory Ratoff, concerns the ambition of fluffy Judith Poe Wells (Alice Faye) to write a searching play, one thing never achieved by her illustrious great grandfather Edgar Allan Poe.* When penniless Miss Wells consumes three orders of spaghetti in a Broadway restaurant, the proprietor and his violinist (Rubinoff) let her sing for her supper. That is enough to convince Diner George Macrae (Don Ameche), a successful musical comedy librettist, that Judith is wasting her time as a playwright. Although this impression is confirmed when Macrae and Producer Sam Gordon (Charles Winninger) read her dismal drama, North Winds, in which the principal characters all freeze to death, they take an option on it as a means of persuading Judith to sing in their forthcoming show. When both rehearsals and romance are upset by jealous Lulu Riley (Miss Hovick), Macrae gets everything running smoothly again by the miraculous expedient of converting North Winds into a hit musical.

Bound to disappoint the admirers of Gypsy Rose Lee, whose sultry gifts are confined to such lines as "I'll cut your heart out and stuff it like an olive," You Can't Have Everything should satisfy almost everyone else. It gives the clowning Ritz Brothers the opportunity to extract the last zany twist from such sequences as playing a swing version of chopsticks, dressing as charwomen to break into the Y. W. C. A. To adept Song Pluggers Alice Faye and Tony Martin, Mack Gordon & Harry Revel have supplied a tiptop score of which the most singable numbers are the title song, Please Pardon Us, We're in Love, and Danger, Love at Work.

Artists & Models (Paramount) begins with the Yacht Club Boys hysterically assembling a musical comedy production number for Chairman Mac Brewster (Jack Benny) of the Artists & Models Ball. That Chairman Brewster's terse comment, "It stinks," does not describe the haphazard entertainment that follows is mainly owing to the scenes which Jack Benny relieves with his deprecating brand of drollery. Otherwise Artists & Models, with Director Raoul Walsh struggling to wedge into it enough people and music for three shows, would have difficulty adding up to one.