THE CINEMA Stage Door." At the Re g al--" Wells Fargo." At
the Carlton--" Popeye the Sailor." At the Carlton IT must be admitted right away that Stage Door is certain to be a big box-office success, and one may suppose that to box- office standards of criticism it is of no interest whether its success is due to the wit and speed of its beginning, or the treacly, cheapjack and reprehensible sentimentality of its end. Of course, nobody can object to a well-calculated exaggeration which, though a synthetic concentrate, gives a picture which is recognisably in touch with normal life ; much of Hollywood's success is owed to just such a plan, and much of the action in the theatrical boarding house of Stage Door achieves, if in a slightly stagey manner, the same inflated accuracy. As long as the rivalry between Katherine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers pursues its bitterly amusing course, and as. long as Constance Collier majestically impales all and sundry on the rusty ferrule of a theatrical past, the film is just as much fun as many other high-grade comedies. But when the half-starved and regrettably neurotic girl (Andrea Leeds) commits suicide because another girl (Miss Hepburn, you may rightly guess) has got the part she always longed for ; and when, as a result, the other girl is so upset by the tragedy that she becomes a great actress on the spot (having shown no sign of previous talent and being entirely without training) ; and when everybody bursts into tears and the auditorium is all a-flutter with damp handkerchiefs, some of us may perhaps be pardoned for suggesting that it is neither tragedy nor comedy nor melodrama, but just plain slush and sobstuff.
After which protest we may turn to the consideration of Miss Hepburn ; for all her supreme technical accomplishment, she is acted right off the screen by Ginger Rogers, whose talent for acting, turns out to be as certain as the parade-ground accuracy of her twinkling feet. Only superb technique indeed could bring off the bad acting Miss Hepburn is called on to represent in the rehearsal scenes, but when, under the pressure of an unbearable grief, she is supposed to reach the very stratosphere of tragedy, we are not able for a moment to forget that this is Miss Hepburn, acting.
Wells Fargo is a trifling and inconsiderable film, which fails to register any of the epic qualities of its subject, and treats in a slight and episodic manner the uninteresting private lives of one or two men and women who link not at all with what in essence should be, but is not, a production in the direct line of The Covered Waggon or Cimarron.
Fortunately, the Carlton programme is enlivened by a two- reel film in colour by Max Fleischer, entitled Popeye the Sailor Meets All Baba's Forty Thieves. Popeye and his associates are the only direct rivals to Disney's supremacy, and Fleischer has had the acumen to concentrate chiefly on human, rather than animal figures. Popeye, you will remember, is an imper- turbable sailor of great strength, which he raises to supernatural energy through the internal application of canned spinach during his perpetual conflict with a scraggy-bearded giant of a villain ; the prize is inevitably a female of doubtful charm but undoubted loyalty, who follows Popeye across desert wastes and raging seas faithfully if slightly hysterically.
Each character has two voices, the second being used for the sotto voce presentation of thoughts ; thus the dialogue plays a far more important part than in the Disney films, chiefly in terms of parody or meiosis, as when the starving travellers in the desert see the mirage of a table loaded with food and drink, and, when it vanishes from their grasp, remark " What a disappointment " and quietly continue their journey, only to find the traffic lights against them in the limitless waste.
There is here more than an exploitation of slapstick in terms of cartoon technique ; there is something of what the surrealists would call surrealism, were it not for the fact that Popeyc is always on the side of law and order, as witness his search for the Forty Thieves, during which he encircles the great globe itself in a coast-guard cutter turned aeroplane. For confirmed Disney fanatics, the coarser but often more virile antics of Fleischer's creations may be an acquired taste, but it is well worth acquiring. I would lay a wager that Donald Duck wishes he could have cornered the spinach market.
BASIL WRIGHT.
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