Cinema: The New Pictures: May 18, 1936

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Show Boat (Universal). From a current Hollywood trend, cinemagoers may deduce that the length of a picture indicates just how good its producers consider it to be. Some recent films have been very long and, at the same time, very poor. But Show Boat, which takes nearly two hours to unroll, is well worth the care which Producer Carl Laemmle Jr. bestowed upon it as his final picture before leaving Universal. Handsomely directed by James Whale, magnificently photographed by Leon Shamroy, it brings to the screen what has become a U. S. institution: Edna Ferber's story of 1926 which was the basis of the Oscar Hammerstein II-Jerome Kern musicomedy of 1927 and an indifferent part-sound film in 1929. The latest cinema version, instead of following the Ferber book, magnifies the stage show, adds three new Kern songs to a score which still rests on many a U. S. piano rack.

Of the original cast, Charles Winninger is again Cap'n Andy of the Cotton Blossom. Heavy-eyed, heavy-mouthed Helen Morgan is the hapless Julie, dashing in the satin flounces of an 1885 showgirl, who is forced to leave Cap'n Andy's troupe when it turns out she is a mulatto illegally married to a white man. Paul Robeson appears as the honest, lazy handyman who does little but sing 01' Man River while the camera travels from his calm black face to toiling Negroes, and finally to the broad, rippling Mississippi — in this case the Los Angeles River, widened to 100 ft. by three steam shovels.

Helen Westley, with the magnificent eyes and nose of an owl, is Cap'n Andy's shrewish wife Parthy. Their daughter Magnolia, whose story is the sad old one of the girl married to a wastrel and abandoned, is Irene Dunne who, in black face and kinky wig, sings Gallivantin' Aroun'. Allan Jones, despite a good voice, makes Magnolia's Gaylord Ravenal into a handsome nonentity. Familiar to many a Show Boater will be Hattie McDaniel, an amiable and enormous Negro who helps Robeson with a rollicking song called Ah Still Suits Me.

British-born Director Whale was completely successful in imparting U. S. period atmosphere to the whirling rivertown parade with which Show Boat opens, to the turn-of-the-century sequence with which it might well have ended. What follows is an outline for some other Irene Dunne picture.

The Case Against Mrs, Ames (Paramount) opens with a shot of a loudspeaker which emits a march tune and an announcement that its dramatized news program is that of "the weekly newsmagazine." There follows an inordinately frenzied resume of what would appear to be just another murder. All this constitutes a dubious asset to a crime-&-courtroom picture which is otherwise well-plotted, well-paced entertainment.

Almost everyone but the jury which frees her seems to believe that Mrs. Ames (Madeleine Carroll) shot and killed her rich husband. An assistant district attorney (George Brent) is so convinced of it that he denounces the jury, gets jailed for contempt of court. Mrs. Ames's dowager mother-in-law (Beulah Bondi) makes the murder a pretext for taking possession of Mrs. Ames's small son. Acting from thoroughly scrambled motives, the assistant district attorney performs some sleuthing while the not particularly bright young widow makes a mess of acting as her own counsel in a court battle for her son.