November 1935
Looking at the cinematic and stage offerings this month, it's interesting how many had political themes. For instance, in its November 4th issue, Time reviewed the Soviet film The New Gulliver. The movie was notable because it featured a cast of three thousand puppets. According to the Time review:
Made of clay, rubber, metal, wood and cloth, specially designed to act for the camera, they are operated not by strings like ordinary marionettes but by invisible human hands which change the puppets' positions and expressions between each film exposure. It took 25 separate shots, for example, to show a puppet raising his arm. This process gives their activities the staccato quality of a Walt Disney cartoon but it is by no means their principal claim to distinction.
The hero of the film was a young Pioneer named Petia who falls asleep and dreams that he is Gulliver in a Lilliputia wracked with struggle between workers and the king. The conflict is sharpened by Petia's "egalitarian" speeches. As this website reports:
Believing Petia to be dead, the king's soldiers, tanks, and fleet begin their attack on the workers, intending to annihilate them. Petia joins the fray. As the workers ambush and blow up the tanks, Petia wades into the ocean and incapacitates the armada. His victory celebration with the workers is cut short by the laughter of the other Pioneers, who have been listening to Petia talking in his sleep.
The film was admired by Chaplin and acclaimed by the New York Times for its "sly assault on bourgeois institutions." The New Yorker (John Mosher) was also impressed. It described the film as "unlike any other Soviet picture as anything you can see." Most Soviet cinema, Mosher noted "stuff the Cameo and the Acme with Muscovite exiles and recently returned tourists." The New Gulliver, by contrast, was "crisp, graceful and witty." The Cameo, which was located on 42d street, was showing The New Gulliver. The Acme, at Union Square, had Eisenstein's Ten Days that Shook the World - undoubtedly well-attended by Muscovite exiles. Evidently, however, there just weren't enough exiles to turn the profit the capitalist system required. The theater closed in 1936.
On the stage, the play "Dead End" was reviewed by Time in its November 11th issue. Written by Sidney Kingsley, the play moved to the screen in 1937. It gave us the expression"dead end kid" and helped launch the "urban renewal" movement.
Time was particularly taken by the sets - designed by Norman Bel Geddes:
Designer Geddes has given the U. S. Theatre new dimensions in the realm of naturalism. Displayed on the stage where David Belasco used to draw plaudits for showing real roses in real vases is apparently the east end of Manhattan's 53rd Street. To the left stands the rear entrance of a swank apartment not unlike River House. In the centre squats a row of verminous flats. To the right rises a grimy coal chute. And all across the front stretches a pier-end from which urchins dive with a splash into what normally would be the orchestra pit, but which gives every illusion of being the fetid East River.
In the New Yorker, Robert Benchley praised Bel Geddes for "a great piece of showmanship." He described the play as "an honest and forceful plea for the kids who live along the east ends of New York streets, where gangsters are bred and limousines parked, all in the same block."
Eleanor Roosevelt saw the play three times and requested a command performance at the White House. Some credit the play with helping to create a national outcry over slum housing and crime which ultimately led to passage of the Wagner Housing bill.
Of less social significance was the long delayed opening of "Jumbo" - which Time reviewed in its November 25th issue. Staged at the Hippodrome, the show was a combination of the musical and the circus. Indeed it was advertised as "Bigger than a show, Better than a circus." Jimmy Durante starred and according to Time, his
big moment comes when he leads out the show's one elephant, points to the pachyderm's snout and then to his own, exclaims, "Me and him's related!" then suddenly finds that his relative has rolled over on him.
The score was by Rodgers and Hart and included "My Romance", "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World" and "Little Girl Blue." According to Gerald Bordman's American Musical Theatre the production cost $340,000. This would translate to about $4.8 million today. According to Bordman, the show ran for seven months but earned back just half of its investment.
Benchley gave the show a favorable review. He commented on the delay in its opening - it had originally been scheduled to open around Labor Day - noting that "[n]ow all that remains is to complete the Triborough Bridge and enforce the sanctions against Italy, and we can all sit back and finish reading 'Europa'". (Europa was among the best-selling novels of 1935. Time described it as an "awkwardly written . . .exhaustive 500-page picture of upper-class Europe in the decades before the War.")
This show must have been worth seeing, if only for the sight of, as Benchley related, "Paul Whiteman, ravishing in baby-blue raiment, astride a white charger at the head of his musical myrmidons."
Speaking of jazz greats, Benny Goodman and his band released seven sides on November 22d. The numbers included "Basin Street Blues" and "When Buddha Smiles" - arranged by Fletcher Henderson - and "Yankee Doodle Never Went to Town" sung by Helen Ward. Bits of these numbers can be heard here.
On November 18th, Time reviewed A Night at the Opera. The magazine noted that the film marked the shift of the team of Groucho, Harpo and Chico from Paramount to MGM.
Irving Thalberg, giving them their present contract, pointed out that he was offering as much for three brothers as they had received before the fourth Marx turned agent. Yelled Groucho Marx: "What do you mean? The same dough? Without Zeppo, we're worth twice as much."
Time did not seem overwhelmed. It called Night "one of the most complicated feature comedies ever photographed" and added that "[t]o U. S. audiences which once split their sides at the Marxes, but now find them dullish, it will be good news that the brothers have some new routines."
The New Yorker echoed this theme. It noted "[t]his is a good Marx brothers film . . .but of course their antics are familiar, their badinage and their general behavior without surprises for most of us."
This contemporary criticism is at odds with received wisdom today - which is that Night represents a striking departure from the more anarchic Paramount films.
Made of clay, rubber, metal, wood and cloth, specially designed to act for the camera, they are operated not by strings like ordinary marionettes but by invisible human hands which change the puppets' positions and expressions between each film exposure. It took 25 separate shots, for example, to show a puppet raising his arm. This process gives their activities the staccato quality of a Walt Disney cartoon but it is by no means their principal claim to distinction.
The hero of the film was a young Pioneer named Petia who falls asleep and dreams that he is Gulliver in a Lilliputia wracked with struggle between workers and the king. The conflict is sharpened by Petia's "egalitarian" speeches. As this website reports:
Believing Petia to be dead, the king's soldiers, tanks, and fleet begin their attack on the workers, intending to annihilate them. Petia joins the fray. As the workers ambush and blow up the tanks, Petia wades into the ocean and incapacitates the armada. His victory celebration with the workers is cut short by the laughter of the other Pioneers, who have been listening to Petia talking in his sleep.
The film was admired by Chaplin and acclaimed by the New York Times for its "sly assault on bourgeois institutions." The New Yorker (John Mosher) was also impressed. It described the film as "unlike any other Soviet picture as anything you can see." Most Soviet cinema, Mosher noted "stuff the Cameo and the Acme with Muscovite exiles and recently returned tourists." The New Gulliver, by contrast, was "crisp, graceful and witty." The Cameo, which was located on 42d street, was showing The New Gulliver. The Acme, at Union Square, had Eisenstein's Ten Days that Shook the World - undoubtedly well-attended by Muscovite exiles. Evidently, however, there just weren't enough exiles to turn the profit the capitalist system required. The theater closed in 1936.
On the stage, the play "Dead End" was reviewed by Time in its November 11th issue. Written by Sidney Kingsley, the play moved to the screen in 1937. It gave us the expression"dead end kid" and helped launch the "urban renewal" movement.
Time was particularly taken by the sets - designed by Norman Bel Geddes:
Designer Geddes has given the U. S. Theatre new dimensions in the realm of naturalism. Displayed on the stage where David Belasco used to draw plaudits for showing real roses in real vases is apparently the east end of Manhattan's 53rd Street. To the left stands the rear entrance of a swank apartment not unlike River House. In the centre squats a row of verminous flats. To the right rises a grimy coal chute. And all across the front stretches a pier-end from which urchins dive with a splash into what normally would be the orchestra pit, but which gives every illusion of being the fetid East River.
In the New Yorker, Robert Benchley praised Bel Geddes for "a great piece of showmanship." He described the play as "an honest and forceful plea for the kids who live along the east ends of New York streets, where gangsters are bred and limousines parked, all in the same block."
Eleanor Roosevelt saw the play three times and requested a command performance at the White House. Some credit the play with helping to create a national outcry over slum housing and crime which ultimately led to passage of the Wagner Housing bill.
Of less social significance was the long delayed opening of "Jumbo" - which Time reviewed in its November 25th issue. Staged at the Hippodrome, the show was a combination of the musical and the circus. Indeed it was advertised as "Bigger than a show, Better than a circus." Jimmy Durante starred and according to Time, his
big moment comes when he leads out the show's one elephant, points to the pachyderm's snout and then to his own, exclaims, "Me and him's related!" then suddenly finds that his relative has rolled over on him.
The score was by Rodgers and Hart and included "My Romance", "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World" and "Little Girl Blue." According to Gerald Bordman's American Musical Theatre the production cost $340,000. This would translate to about $4.8 million today. According to Bordman, the show ran for seven months but earned back just half of its investment.
Benchley gave the show a favorable review. He commented on the delay in its opening - it had originally been scheduled to open around Labor Day - noting that "[n]ow all that remains is to complete the Triborough Bridge and enforce the sanctions against Italy, and we can all sit back and finish reading 'Europa'". (Europa was among the best-selling novels of 1935. Time described it as an "awkwardly written . . .exhaustive 500-page picture of upper-class Europe in the decades before the War.")
This show must have been worth seeing, if only for the sight of, as Benchley related, "Paul Whiteman, ravishing in baby-blue raiment, astride a white charger at the head of his musical myrmidons."
Speaking of jazz greats, Benny Goodman and his band released seven sides on November 22d. The numbers included "Basin Street Blues" and "When Buddha Smiles" - arranged by Fletcher Henderson - and "Yankee Doodle Never Went to Town" sung by Helen Ward. Bits of these numbers can be heard here.
On November 18th, Time reviewed A Night at the Opera. The magazine noted that the film marked the shift of the team of Groucho, Harpo and Chico from Paramount to MGM.
Irving Thalberg, giving them their present contract, pointed out that he was offering as much for three brothers as they had received before the fourth Marx turned agent. Yelled Groucho Marx: "What do you mean? The same dough? Without Zeppo, we're worth twice as much."
Time did not seem overwhelmed. It called Night "one of the most complicated feature comedies ever photographed" and added that "[t]o U. S. audiences which once split their sides at the Marxes, but now find them dullish, it will be good news that the brothers have some new routines."
The New Yorker echoed this theme. It noted "[t]his is a good Marx brothers film . . .but of course their antics are familiar, their badinage and their general behavior without surprises for most of us."
This contemporary criticism is at odds with received wisdom today - which is that Night represents a striking departure from the more anarchic Paramount films.
posted by Whistling Dixie at 12:31 PM
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