Judge — July 1938 — page 28: what you’re looking at

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

HERE is no use getting furious about Robert Taylor at this late date. He has stolen into the heart of America as young men with good looks and no appreciable talents have been stealing ever since Thomas A. Edison discovered the movies by accident one day in the 1890's. He was not on the list of people the Independent Exhib- itors got up who are poison at the box office, so evidently he is O.K. with the exhibitors, But who likes him? Greta Garbo, pethaps (Garbo Loves Taylor, one of the great advertising campaigns of our time), and Barbara Stanwyck, who de- nies that they are anything more than good friends. But the enthusiasm i$ not widespread. Whenever we meet a pret- ty young lady we ask her playfully, “What about Robert Taylor?” She con- fesses to a certain fondness for Cary Grant or Gary Cooper or that young man leaning carelessly against the man- telpiece. But “Robert Taylor,’ she says, “you can have him.” We decline po- litely. Robert Taylor has been in eight movies in the past year (during which time, he confided recently, the only thing that kept him going was Lucky Strikes). They were not very good movies. That was fine. People who wanted to see Robert Taylor could go to them, people who wanted to see good movies could go somewhere else, people who like to get their enjoyment from within themselves could stay home with a good book, for all we cared. Then Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer indiscreetly put him in Camille. He let his hair grow and was so obviously pleased with his appearance that Life began referring to him as Beautiful. Then MGM put him in A Yank at Oxford, which did much to spike Life’s unfair insinuation. Now, in one scene in Three Comrades, he is shown in a low-cut bathing suit, and he has hair on his chest, all right, lots of it. Robert Taylor is thoroughly vindi- cated. But MGM, in Three Comrades, has double-crossed people like us by put- ting him in a good movie. Camille was not bad, and Yank at Oxford was not the piece of cheese it should have been. Three Comrades is a very good movie. It weasels no more than the movies seem to think they must. Its theme is the confusion, the fighting, the hunger THE MOVIES By Robert Terrall in Germany after Versailles; its most effective scenes are street fights. You would think it would really have to stop a moment and say who is fighting whom, but it never does. The only ban. ner you see is just out of sight of the camera so you get only one letter and that doesn’t give anything away. In a superb scene a young Nazi shoots down one of the three comrades, but you never know for sure that he és a Nazi. That was so the film could be shown in Ger- many: it won't be shown in Germany anyway, for all their precautions. It would have been better if MGM had been more reckless; but you can’t be reckless when a movie is costing you a couple of million dollars. The limitations of Three Comrades are precisely the limitations of Robert Taylor. Margaret Sullavan and Franchot Tone are good enough actors to make him seem slightly less awful than he is. Fortunately he doesn’t try to act, as he did once or twice in Camille. When he is meant to get drunk he instinctively does the right thing and stays sober. And we were appalled to notice that, while as an actor he is getting no better, as a beautiful young man he is getting a little fat. And when a beautiful young man ceases to be beautiful, lucky for whim if he has set up a trust fund and has some money in the bank. Meanwhile, we understand that revivals of The Sheik and The Son of the Sheik are hitting it off around the country. We hope that when Robert Taylor insen- sibly steals out of the heart of America, Rudolf Valentino will be allowed to steal back in. There was a man. Samuel Goldwyn announced today that the new title of the film previous- ly announced as “The Cowboy and the Lady” is now “The Lady and the Cow- boy.” Publicity Release. Well, that takes care of that. The Cardinal said that his church had been baptized were regarded as could not discriminate, since all who Chris- tians irrespective of the date. New York Times. Come, come, Cardinal, pull yourself together. comicbooks.com