Luise Rainer Dies Again Beautifully

Radio Record, Volume XII, Issue 29, 30 December 1938, Page 14

Luise Rainer Dies Again Beautifully

eee {"The Toy Wife." M-G-M. . Directed by Richard Thorpe. Starring Luise Rainer, Melvyn Douglas, .Robert Young. For early release.] HERE is no other person on the screen who ean die as charmingly as Luise Rainer. And if every picture which stars this Viennese actress has a particular ‘Rainer highlight," in "The Toy Wife," her latest for M.G.M., it is’ the deathbed scene at the finish. Her gallant little telephoae conversation is the thing I remember most about "The Great Ziegfeld"; the handing over of the two precious pearls in "The Good Earth"; and the deathbed scene in "The Toy Wife." silly and Vain IPH longer she stays in Hollywood the more foreign in her speech and manner does Rainer become. In "The Toy Wife" she earries coyness to an uncomfortable degree ... her simplicity was a poor mask for her frivolous, foolish soul, and the thing that amazed me most was that a man as solid and sensible as the hero (Melvyn Douglas played the part) could marry a girl as silly and vain as M’selle Frou Frou. But Frou Frou had a sister who was easy to look at, interesting, and with as much heart as a stick of celery. And yet it took nearly two hours, the deaths of three people and a great deal of discomfort and misery for the real hero and heroize to discover each other. Parisian Red PROV FROU, educated in Paris, returns to America to live near New Orteans with her French-descended father and sister. But she is quite determined to paint the little Franco-Ameri-ean community a. bright Parisian red. With her new clothes (the film is set in early Colonial days), her gZay irresponsible manter and her eoyness she just mows ’em dowa, and soon New Orleans’ two most eigible bachelors are on the warpath. ¥rou Frou marries. the more serious of the two, has a son whom she treats more like a plaything, and generally gets her home, her life and her family into a glorieus muddle,

Pistols For Two ND then, to enhance still further her reputation for complete irresponsibility, she runs off with the man she might have married, but didn’t. In the meanwhile her sister continues to look after the home, the child and the husband. The two men finally meet in a duel and the ead-cheerfully played by Robert Young-is killed. Fron YFrou’s father, weighed down by asgrace and rhenmatism, dies, and Frou Frou, in the best Camille manner, gets consumption. And so, poverty-stricken, pale and more doll-like than ever, Frou Frou returns fo her old home to die in as touching a scene as the movies have brought us. That is what the film trade calls e "woman’s picture," which means that, while strong men squirm, their comranions wilt be having a lovely orgy of weeping in the comfortable darkness.