Cinema: The New Pictures: Mar. 28, 1932

The Wet Parade (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is an honest and clever adaptation of Upton Sinclair's sloppy tract on Prohibition (TIME, Sept. 28). Without the radicalism of its original, it delineates the evils of drink and shows, without partiality Wet or Dry, that guzzling to excess brings misery. The heroine (Dorothy Jordan) is the daughter of a charming but besotted Southern gentleman (Lewis Stone). His suicide and the inherited alcoholism of her brother are enough to make her drink shy. She has an even better reason. In Manhattan, where she finds her brother drunk in a hotel, she meets a youth (Robert Young), whose father, like her own, is inebriate. Because of Prohibition, the father (Walter Huston) drinks raw alcohol in large quantities. It drives him so wild that he beats his wife to death. Dorothy Jordan and Robert Young are drawn together by their mutual hate of alcohol. When they marry, Young joins the Federal Prohibition force. He soon learns the futility of his endeavor from a seasoned agent of the law (Jimmy Durante). Gangsters try to kill him. He is saved by Durante at the lamentable expense of Durante's own life. But this is only a minim of catastrophe. The heroine's brother goes blind from poison booze. The hero's father gets life imprisonment for murder.

The Wet Parade is thus a horrid but exciting reprobate's progression, replete with all the disasters that can befall a drunkard as he lurches toward the grave. It is brilliantly acted by a fine cast, coherently constructed and, unlike D. W. Griffith's miserable picture The Struggle, manufactured in the present tense. Good shot: a 'legger's plant in full operation, showing the printing presses for fake labels, the process of dousing whiskey bottles in brine to make them look as though they had come off a boat.

Hotel Continental (Tiffany). Having stumbled upon unity-of-place in Vicki Baum's Grand Hotel, cinema producers have been fascinated by it, presumably because it contradicts the prime advantage of their medium—ubiquity. Hotel Continental varies the unity-of-place idea by nearly personifying it. This time the hotel is an old one about to be torn down and the denizens who scamper through its antique corridors are bent on the forlorn gaiety of a farewell party. Mingling with the other guests is a cosmopolitan thief (Theodore Von Eltz) who hopes to retrieve some money which he cached in a fireplace long before. He experiences some trouble getting it because there is a party in the suite where it is hidden and because his accomplice turns out to be a lady member of a rival gang of thieves. She betrays him but regrets it, in time to persuade him to risk a reformation. Produced by a small company with an inexpensive cast, cheap sets and a trick story, the film is fair entertainment and should be even fairer as an investment for its makers. Good shot: a fat person (Bert Roach) softly crying "Help!" as he tries, with two straws, to extricate a cherry from a drink.