GLAMOUR TAKES A BEATING

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 225, 21 September 1940, Page 6 (Supplement)

GLAMOUR TAKES A BEATING

By James Arthur

Screen Page

IF the forthcoming films are any criterion, the age of chivalry is definitely dead. Glamour has never taken such a beating since James Cagney slapped Mae Clarke in the face with half a grapefruit. Brawls, gun fights, riots, sudden death and destruction and look at the names of thpse who are participating: Joan Crawford, Claudette Colbert, all, in former days, the epitome of glamour! "In Destry Rides Again," Marlene Dietrich, as a Western dance liall girl, had a fight with Una Merkel that had no holds barred. In "Hollywood Cavalcade," Alice Faye was slapped in her pretty face with custard pics fir a revival of the old Mack Sennctt touch, and fell off a motor cycle into a mud puddle. In "Little Old New York" she was cuffed about by waterfront ruffians and engaged in a scrap with Ward Bond, former football and track star.

It was the American In<liau« who pushed Claudette Colbert around in "Drums Along the Mohawk," and a similar experience is had by Isabel ,Jewell in "North-West Passage." After being rescued from the Indians, she fights with Spencer Tracy and Walter Brennan in turn and comes out victorious, or almost eo, each time. Ann Sothern, not much bigger than Isabel, will virtually duplicate the latter's experience in "Congo Maisie." John Carroll kicks her out of his bunk, throws her out of his cabin and makes her walk through the jungle. Finally she gets even, or partly so, byhriuliiig off and knocking him into the middle of next Christmas. Miriam Hopkins, in "Virginia City," almost starves to death and dies on the desert. Ann Sheridan, in "Torrid Zone," finds herself at the mercy of the jungle. Virginia Field, in "The Cisco Kid and the Lady," is a barmaid who gets beaten up in a brawl. And newcomer Doris

Bowdon had some rare experience* in her'role as Rosasharon in "Tlie Grapes of Wrath." Add all the foregoing together, multi- _ ply by ten, and you obtain some idea of what happens to Joan Crawford in the ways of perils and torments, buffetings and beatings in "Strange Cargo." Joan plays Julie, the cafe entertainer in a penal colony. The only woipan in the cast, apart from small role» at the beginning and end played by Betty Compson and Sara Haden, Joan has nine desperate and thoroughly unscrupulous males to deal with and what they 'do to her is enough to thrill anybody. Only the Westerns Left The only glimmer of hope for the old clinging vine type seems to lie in the Western field, where it would be absolutely unheard of to let the females appear stronger than the men. There, and there alone, the spirit of Galahad and Sir Walter Raleigh survives.