Cinema: The New Pictures: Dec. 5, 1932

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This will give some idea of the conversation in The Half Naked Truth. It is romance between a circus spieler (Tracy) and a cooch dancer (Velez) made funny by the way the dialog, by Bartlett Cormack and Corey Ford, and Gregory La Cava's direction favor the eccentricities of Tracy and Velez. Vaguely derived from incidents in the life of famed Publicist Harry Reichenbach, the story rambles about in the noisy manner of such carnival anecdotes. The spieler blackmails a producer (Frank Morgan), puts a lion in the cooch dancer's hotel room. Ballyhooed into being a musical comedy star, she goes back to cooch dancing when the spieler publicizes another carnival wench in connection with a nudist colony. Possibly because preview audiences were so enthusiastic about The Half Naked Truth, RKO last fortnight ceased bickering with Cinemactor Tracy about his salary, which was withheld when he frequently failed to appear on the set. Terms of the agreement: $1,750, half of the salary due Cinemactor Tracy to be paid immediately, half when he has made his next picture for RKO.

Prosperity (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). If you took any comic strip joke about a mother-in-law, multiplied it by two, added a bank failure, four platitudes about the silver lining, and a vaudeville fox terrier you would have all the ingredients of Prosperity except the one which makes it human and amusing. This ingredient is Marie Dressier, who always impersonates grunting, sympathetic, noisy, witty, violent, immensely courageous old ladies but somehow manages to do it with enough vitality to make them seem alive. This time she is Maggie Warren, a grizzled widow who runs her husband's bank until the day her son gets married, when she turns over the reins to him. His mother-in-law is a Mrs. Praskins (Polly Moran) who is all that Maggie Warren is not. Lizzie Praskins has the face, manners and characteristics of a rat and she starts a run on the Warren bank by squeaking for her money out of a desire to be troublesome. The run is disastrous because young John Warren has been so stupid as to lend the bank's best bonds to parties who do not wish to give them back. All this reduces Maggie Warren to noble penury. She sells her house and furnishings, goes with her dog, Mutt, to board at Mrs. Praskins'. W7hen humiliated into leaving she makes the gesture of committing suicide so that her life insurance will enable the bank to reopen. Wobbling her jaw, protruding her underlip and narrowing her eyes, Marie Dressier somehow makes the crude fable (written by Sylvia Thalberg, sister of MGM's Production Chief Irving Thalberg) laughable and interesting. Most vulgar shot: Maggie Warren finding out that the bottle from which she has been gulping what she thought was poison, contained something else.