Judge — March 1938 — page 31: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE MOVIES By Robert Terrall N THE month and a half since peo- ple began forming in lines a block long outside the theatres that were showing Snow White, a considerable body of critical doctrine has grown up around the character of the speechless and slightly retarded dwarf Dopey. I like Dopey. I like the other six dwarfs. But there are some things in Snow White 1 don't like. I don’t think the Princess was such a hot idea. At first I thought she looked like Simone Simon. Then I thought she looked like Ginger Rogers. She doesn’t look like either, but she is unquestionably the Hollywood type, even to the extent of having no nose in full face. And the Prince—he is as unreal and one-dimensional as Robert Taylor, and Robert Taylor is in quite enough movies. To the three-year-old girl in front of me that love affair betwen the Prince and Princess was an excruciating bore. (I liked that three-year-old girl. She was not yet old enough to own a hat with a feather, and I got a good view of the screen for the first time in six months.) But I don’t think Mr. Disney was aiming Snow White at the little three. vear-old girl. When the dwarfs chased the witch up the mountain, when the March, 1938 queen went through her Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde transformation into the old hag, Miss Three-Year-Old had the wits scared out of her. And as for the quieter scenes—well, she was much too sophis- ticated to think it would be nice to be tucked into bed by bluebirds. Snow White was really aimed at the critics. And the way the newspaper critics responded to Snow White must have warmed Mr. Disney's heart. The magazine critics wondered if Snow White was not too unrealistic and too damned sentimental. Nobody thinks of asking Mr. Disney to make his dwarfs in their diamond mine join the United Mine Workers; nobody thinks of asking Mr. Disney to change his dwarfs at all. But the other people in Snow White ought to have been a little more hard. boiled. If Donald Duck had been pres. ent when the Princess was singing to the timid animals of the forest, he would have been disgusted. And you can tell that Mr. Disney was a little disgusted, too. Later on he lin. gered very lovingly over the two buz- zards that followed the old witch up the mountain. He liked those buzzards, And those buzzards are a lot more appealing than bluebirds, any day. 29 comicbooks.com