JOAN CRAWFORD AND GABLE

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 57, 4 September 1937, Page 7

JOAN CRAWFORD AND GABLE

"LOVE ON THE RUN"

Imagination runs riot in the newspaper romance-comedy "Love on the Hun" the new Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer picture at the Majestic Theatre, Sally Parker (Joan Crawford) is an American heiress who grows sick of the publicity about her, and who nates reporters. Michael (Clark Gable) and Barnabas (Franchot Tone) are rival reporters whose fates, owing to their news-hunger, become intertwined with Sally's; but because of her loathing of men of their calling, they have to disguise it. Gable is the arch-fiend of the pair, and Tone is his butt, almost too good-natured to live. Gable, under pretence of getting Sally away from her newspaper persecutors, induces her to travel with him, and they finally arrive in France, she believing Gable to be an ordinary unjournalistic American, and not knowing that he is secretly feeding his newspaper with daily stories of their companionable wanderings. But at' last she discovers (through Tone) a Paris edition of this American newspaper and so learns that her supposed protector-from-publicity has really been selling her daily to her enemy the Press. She says caustic things about people who are ready to sell their souls, and anybody else's soul, for three cents a word; and she dismisses Gable. But the intervention of two German spies, the Baron and the Baroness, played by Reginald Owen and Mona Barrie, results in both Sally and Gable being kidnapped. Tone enters the room where Gable sits gagged and bound, releases him. and is silly enough to take his place, accepting gags and bonds while Gable once more gets a\kray with Sally. This combination of cuteness and gullibility in the character played by Tone provides most of the comedy, and if the honours have to be divided between the three . leads (Miss Crawford. and Gable and Tone) it is fair to say that the division is about equal. One of the best scenes in "Love on the Hun" is staged in Fontainebleau, where,, in the apartments once adorned by Louis XIV and Madame Maintenon, the fugitive >pair (Sally and Gable) dance a minuet in costumes borrowed from the. Royal wardrobes. The caretaker, a thorough believer in Royal ghosts, takes them to be a reincarnation of the famous monarch and the noted mistress; but the fraud is exposed when the guide of some "conducted" tourists arrives in the morning and surprises the masqueraders under disadvantageous circumstances. They have to flee without discovering an answer to a question that is troubling them—why -Cardinal Richelieu is so much like George Arliss. This neat hint of an artistic tragedy, by which the Cardinal becomes lost' in an actor instead of the actor becoming lost in the Cardinal, helps to lift "Love on the Run" above the ordinary level of helter-skelter comedy-romance. The large and appreciative audience in the Majestic Theatre last evening is evidence that light themes are popular, and that Miss Crawford and Gable and Tone have their following. Turkey and Kamal Ataturk are featured in the "March of Time" series in the first part of the programme; the post-war history of Turkey is carried right .down to the fortification of the Dardanelles. Another picture important to current history displays the strength of the French Army. The Royal visit to North Ireland includes some memorable Belfast scenes. Hollywood personalities, and' some of their special entertainments, are shown in colour, and there are sample scenes from the coming big picture, ' "The Good Earth." Lovers of dogs should not miss a beautiful canine story, "Wanted, a Master." ' . .