GOOD-BYE JAZZ AND NIGGER HEAVEN

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 169, 13 April 1935, Page 19

GOOD-BYE JAZZ AND NIGGER HEAVEN

Here Comes “The Merry Widow” (By John .Storm.) There arc those who think they can add with good effect to the Bible or improve ou it II G. Wells, for instance, in his “First and Last Things,” pretty nearly offers a new Trinity—if it be not blasphemous to mention it. It affects me a little in like manner to think of. the person or persons who have added their “lyrics” to ‘‘The Merry Widow.” However, no one can reaiij talie away from Lehar’s happy nnieic by adding something to it. Judging by his beaming smile in the introduction to the film we gather he thinks so too, and that lie has put himself into the care ot tlie famous Lubitsch without a backward glance. , . Some of us have expected to see tne sta'-e Merry Widow of a generation ago —and of many times since—transferred bodily to the screen, and when that dm not happen we thought, “What has happened to the dear old Merry Widow/ We did not pause to think she has met with Ernst. Lubitsch —as a kind of glorified beauty specialist—and become nil young again ! We realise instantly that she has put out of joint the nose of all the crooners, all the jazz walkers, and all the Harlem “Nigger Heaven” haunted dancers for the moment, and brought back something less hectic. The music and the melodies of an operetta that has lived for 30 years in the hearts of a people since torn by war, and greed, and revenge, and financial stress, as. all the Western world has been, comes now to rescue us all. Pictures are indeed signs of the times, and, it so often happens, reflections of a prevailing mood. And I think our prevailing mood is "Let us go back to the real things before the war tore peoples asunder.” Lubitsch is expansive and opulent in taste, and he likes variety, hence the shining parquetry and mirror-bright hans in the Paris Embassy, scenes, where hundreds of dancers in a swirl of glittering uniforms and diaphanous draperies inove in and out of great open doorways. But I rather hankered for the halt elfish scenes of the play where Prince Danilo performed such ter.psicborean marvels, m a shady wood —that kind of Russian dance said to be “Marsovian” in the story. , . , . And there are those who might question the adequateness of Jeanette Macdonald as Sonia. Her voice is her tortune, her manner her own. And I believe it is loved by Continental people who find in her utterly unsophisticated frivolity the opposite of the women or their older civilisation. Sophisticated serious lightness is unknown to ,ty iS American girl. Jeanette is downright, absolutely. When she wishes to suggest she is of the great world rather than a Marsovian shepherdess and banker’s widow, she gives a great wink which might envelope all the men in the. world, but never takes them in. In this way Jennette is a study. Danilo is a different kind of study. The one and only Maurice Chevalier is more In tune with Continental ideas of frivolous procedure. He is more in tune' with the great world, and though he makes a fine “romantic lend,” as they say in the press notices, he has more than a touch of that reserve which is the essence of tlie contract. Maurice has not much voice,, but he makes up for it in sheer “personality.’ These two are ably supported by two or three old favourites. Una Merkel, 'with her “voice of tin and her heart of gold,” as the “Bulletin” once said, is always good, and George Barbier with her. But the cream of the picture is Edward Everet Horton as the Marsovian Ambassador in Paris. He is the same, but new' He surpasses his best by a long way. and the film would be a good evening’s entertainment with his solemn and wittily worded part alone. As the anxious host trying to engineer a love affair between tlie beggar black sheep prince and Marsovia’s expensive widow shepherdess he is consummate I Edward Everet Horton can stand in the background, or the foreground, or the middle distance, of a film and make all the other characters shine as.he pleases And he always pleases. He is the most generous of players. If Jeanette is a little, too determinedly “frivolous." and Lubitsch a little too expansive, laying every scene before us witli less than need be left to the imagination, it is the same old Merry Widow! Tlie same old melodies, simple as n folk song, are there to delight us. and Maurice gleams through it all like a firefly on a summer night.