Cinema: The New Pictures: Apr. 4, 1938

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Fools for Scandal (Warner Bros.) cost $900,000, of which harum-scarum Actress Carole Lombard got $150,000, Belgian-born Actor Fernand Gravet $50,000. Less of a drain on the budget was the $25 a day paid for several weeks to cafe society's No. 1 hitchhiker, "Prince" Mike Romanoff (real name: Harry Gerguson). Actor Gravet got his first Hollywood job (The King and the Chorus Girl) year and a half ago because Producer-Director Mervyn LeRoy thought he resembled Edward VIII. Prince Mike got his because there is no one Hollywood appreciates more than a persistent pretender.

But when Fools for Scandal was last week presented to U. S. cinemaudiences, Actor-Prince Mike's lowbrowed, pseudo-Romanoff visage had joined the innumerable faces on the cutting room floor. What remained was more fustian than fun, a pursuit through high & low worlds of a popular, penniless French marquis working his way, via the scullery, into a cinema star's boudoir. In spite of Actress Lombard's strident earthiness, the result is as unearthly as Actor Gravet's French-flavored, concave British inflection, as wooden as Charlie McCarthy—whom Actor Gravet, in claw-hammer coat & starchy shirt front, resembles more than he does Windsor.

After finishing Fools for Scandal, Producer LeRoy, a son-in-law of Triumvir Harry M. Warner, left the family plot for a production berth at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, safe from barbed thrusts about nepotism. Sawed-off, narrow-eyed, cigar-waving Producer LeRoy is still hailed, at 37, as the Boy Wonder. At five he fell three stories in the San Francisco earthquake, landed unhurt on a mattress. At nine, engaged at $2.50 a week in a stage production of Barbara Frietchie to watch for the Rebels from a prop tree, he fell out of the tree, got a raise because audiences liked the variation. After a try at vaudeville singing he got into films, posed as a cameraman, worked as a gagman, then got a chance at directing. As a director he is best at purposeful melodrama (Little Caesar, Five Star Final, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang,They Won't Forget), which he usually endows with newsreel clarity, noteworthy ingenuity. In drawing-room comedy his approach is parvenu.

Un Garnet de Bal (Studios Francois I) is as expertly designed and executed a piece of dramatic tapestry as the cinema has woven in many a year. Its pat pattern follows the musing finger of a French widow (Marie Bell) as she traces over the names on the program of her first ball, nearly 20 years ago, then sets out to check up on these beaux of yesteryear.

As one by one she tries to find them again, the camera shows dramatic glimpses into many lives. The first was a suicide for love of Cristine, but lives on in the mind of a grief-mad mother. Another, the one who wooed her in verse, is now a slick crook. The composer (Harry Baur), of whose lyric tribute she was gaily unappreciative, has turned priest. The optimist (Raimu) who was going to be president is mayor of his village, is about to wed his cook. She traces the next to the Marseille water front. There the cameras are literally tilted, and with shrewdly-angled photography emphasize the skidding career of the hagridden, one-eyed, epileptic physician she finds. Back at the scene of the ball, today's reality convinces her that her memories must all have been a lacy dream.