Life — October 12, 1928 — page 19: what you’re looking at

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

ai whe (Ww Very Cross Tuere must be two George M. Cohans, One is our hero, the author of the two Cohan revues and “Seven Keys to Baldpate,” co-author with God of “The Tavern,” father of Crazy Burlesque, and, to our mind, one of the great emancipating forces in the American theatre. The other is a strange man who gocs about putting the blight of conven- tonality on everything that he touches, mumbling “what the public wants... . what the public wants” (having in mind the public which cheered Admiral Dewey), and, in every particular, being so antagonistic to the real George M. Cohan as to give grounds for suspicion that there is witchery at work in another Jekyll and Hyde case. We do not know the inside story of the production of “Elmer the Great,” but we do know that Ring Lardner never wrote it as it stands. We can no more be fooled by his name on the program as author than we would be at seeing “Your Broad- way and Mine” in the Evening Graphic signed by Henry Thoreau. By a delicate handling of a micrometer-caliper we were able to detect perhaps four spots at which the line veered into the Lardner influence. And if the rest was not Mr. Cohan in his G. A. R. uniform we will eat our new gray hat, much as we like to wear it. aS Taxixe one of the most searching bits of social satire in the language, the “You Know Me AI’? stories, by the one man who can make Mr. Cohan look like a Senate page in the field of mad dramatic burlesque, Mr. Cohan has reduced it to just about as banal a bit of stock theatri- als as you have seen since “Shore Acres.” Ithas got everything that Mr. Cohan him- slf has kidded in the past, even to the approaching sleigh-bells. (As they came rather early, we had a wild hope, it being a Lardner-Cohan opus, that when the sleigh-bells stopped outside the door Uncle Sam might lead in a camel. But no.) About once in every act, owing doubtless to faulty copy-reading in the Cohan office, a Lardner line was allowed to creep in, at which an eager audience laughed with pathetic vigor, and through- Robert Benchley out the play Mr. Walter Huston, as perfect an embodiment of the old Jack Keefe as Mr. Lardner could wish, opposed an equally perfect performance to the overwhelming weight of the garden truck he had to carry. A play by Ring Lardner with Walter Huston to act in it would have been almost too good to be borne. WE bo not usually get very excited about producers’ tampering with their play- wrights’ stuff. It goes on all the time, and, in some cases, results in a play far beyond the author's original capabilities. But tampering with Ring Lardner’s stuff is a serious matter and even Mr. Cohan is not big enough to do it. He has not even made a good hack play out of it. How- ever impractical he may have considered the Lardner original, he has not made it more practical by stuffing it with Jell-O. Although we once nominated George M. Cohan for President and still keep a can- dle burning in front of his past per- formances, we must admit with our fea- tures convulsed in pain that, sooner than see him do this to Ring Lardner, we would have him running that clevator that he swore to run if the Actors’ Equity won the strike back in 1919. Ix tHE middle of “Jarnegan” there comes an act which, thanks to Clark Robinson's setting and the acting of Richard Ben- nett, comes pretty near making a real play out of it. This makes the last act seem all the more of a flop. It would have seemed pretty much of a flop anyway. One of those stage Hollywood orgies in which extras mill about and spill punch, it works itself up into a froth and goes right on up into the flies, where it stays as the curtain descends, We have heard quite a lot about the wickedness of Hollywood, but Mr. Tully in his book, and Messrs. Beahan and Fort in their play, almost make us believe that nothing could be as bad as that, and that consequently the whole thing must be a legend devised by people who didn’t get along with Louis B. Mayer. We are almost ready for a Hollywood drama in which a lot of people sit around of an evening trying to think up something to do and end by going to Henri's for a sandwich and to bed at eleven. For, judg- ing by our own personal experience in this sink of iniquity, such is the routine de- bauchery lett open to people who don’t want to go to Grauman’s Egyptian and see a feature picture. There may be a lot of wild work going on, but whenever we tried to call people up for an evening of sin they were going to bed at nine in order to be on the Jot at eight in the morning. Maybe we weren't physically attractive. a © No matter how cheap or unbelievable your drama may be, you can always get some sort of effect by leading your hero out of a cell down the corridor to the elec- tric chair. There ought to be a special levy on royalties derived from such an easy source. If it is possible to have a woman relative come to the cell door and sob hysterically, you don’t have to bother with anything else earlier in the play. Messrs. Shipman and Hymer didn’t. “Fast Life” is one of those melodramas which present what is supposed to be an emotional problem. The only drawback to its success is that nobody cares whether it is solved or not. Working up by easy stages through a murder, executive hear- ing for clemency and several minor de- vices, this drama at last offers a scene in the death-house in which four condemned men indulge in badinage and singing after the manner of men about to die. It is all very charming. Then an explicit scene in the chair itself, at which la in the audience gasp, thereby fulfilling the ex- poctations of the authors and pleasing Mr. Woods. Miss Claudette Colbert, after her suc- cess in London, must feel a little out of place in this paper-covered drama, and Chester Morris and Crane Wilbur also probably think back longingly on more rputable associations. William Morris, however, has discovered through this en- gagement that, if Al Smith is elected, he can step into the Governorship without having to change his make-up. The Confidential Guide to current plays will be found on page 26. comicbooks.com