CONSIDERING how hard Hollywood finds it to get all of its departments on one track when they make a movie, you are grateful when even one department manages to be good. This is the kind of movie RKO’s “Joan of Paris” is. The good department is the action. The story is concerned with five English fliers grounded in France and trying to escape the Gestapo long enough to get back to England. If the script had made things a little more exciting and the people more substantial and less like Hollywood actors, the movie might have been good enough. As it is, Director Robert Stevenson deserves all of the credit for making a zero script into something which is presentable, if not much else. Stevenson is the director who is up to his ears in dramatic tone. For him that means turning the lights down low, having the people whisper intensely and filming the action very deliberately and slowly. And no other director is so slow. When someone walks downstairs, Stevenson almost shows you his footprints. This time how could he help it if the script wasn’t exciting and nothing happened after all of his pains? At least he made it look harrowing.
This is the picture to introduce the French actress, Michele Morgan, and unfortunately both for the story and herself it’s one of those flubbed introductions that force you to say Pardon me, I didn’t catch the name. As usual, Hollywood was more concerned with making sure she held on to her glamor through everything than in getting a character with significance for story and credibility for you. Then there are Laird Cregar and Paul Henreid who seemed intent on proving they could act. They could, just like Laird Cregar and Paul Henreid.
I don’t know why Columbia called its latest effort “Bedtime Story” unless they figured to put you to sleep with it. But in that case everybody talked too noisily. This noise was intended as satire on the love life of a famous playwright and his equally famous stage-acting wife, and satirically enough, Loretta Young is the actress. If you can manage to fall asleep, wake up for the last few situations, which are funny.
The Russian film “Tanya” is about the Cinderella who “exchanges her humble station, not for the perfumed languor of a shining palace, but for the dignity of free labor.” Quite a sermon. The moral is that the greatest pleasure is for her who turns the most looms. Tanya starts as a household drudge who looks like a butterball and acts like Charlie Chaplin. From there to school; from school to janitor; from janitor to loom worker—first one loom, then two, eight, sixteen, and finally a record, 150 looms at once. Running out of loom room, she becomes an engineer, and on an off day finds time to get married. A working woman’s “Yank at Oxford” and no better.
Breaking in a new Deanna Durbin on the movie-going public is almost certain to call for the soft home-cooking of “You’re Always in My Heart.” This movie, better known as what is home without a father, is the one about the separated parents brought together again by their children. As usual, Kay Francis has to be Mother; Walter Huston is Father because Lewis Stone belongs to MGM. The villain says, “Kay, you’ve been a widow long enough, and I’d like to take over the burden.” Whereupon the governor paroles father Huston in time to save Kay from marrying into wealth, his son from going to the dogs, his operatic daughter from drowning; to make a happy ending happier he achieves radio fame with a harmonica band. And meanwhile the reason for all this, Gloria Warren, turns out to be a good actress in spite of what you’re thinking, likable and professional. But this one is not even recommended for harmonica-lovers.
April 6, 1942