New Plays in Manhattan

The Front Page. It has become customary to write plays which instruct, while they gibe or cheer, in the rudiments of exciting professions. The liquor racket, the theatrical profession, the industry of the gangster, the sly legerdemain of politicians, each has been subjected to severe and detailed definition. More unscrupulous and exciting even than such are the obscure practices of journalism; these, brilliantly, savagely, profanely elucidated in The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, made the play an immediate success in Manhattan.

The plot of The Front Page, melodramatic to an extreme and too complicated for complete exposition, concerns Hildy Johnson of the Herald and Examiner, engaged in reporting the execution of a feeble-minded murderer. The locale of the play is Chicago, its scene the press room in the Criminal Courts Building wherein Hildy Johnson and his jargoning confreres occupy themselves with strong language and unscrupulous efforts to intimidate the sheriff and the fat, flatulent mayer. When it is learned that the convict has broken jail, all the newshawks scatter in the effort to discover him. Hildy Johnson, whose plans are for an immediate marriage and retirement from the newspaper business, watches them scamper off and then makes ready to catch the New York train. As he opens the press room door, the murderer, who has climbed down from the roof, enters the room by the window. Only a very bad reporter could leave his job at such a moment. Hildy Johnson hides his quary in a rolltop desk and prepares to scoop the story.

His impatient fiancee can see no cause in all this for delaying their departure, nor can her maundering old mother. The two of them wobble into the press room whence they are rudely ejected by Walter Burns, the city editor of the Herald and Examiner. Eventually the murderer is discovered in his lair, and Hildy Johnson, deprived of his scoop, prepares to desert the racket that enthralls him. His city editor hands him his watch for a testimonial wedding present; then, loath to lose so able an assistant, he arranges to have policemen board the reporter's train and bring him back to town.

The action of the play from the moment the murderer, Earl Williams, breaks jail is too much for any plot to hold. There are moments like the one in which the little trollop who loves the criminal jumps out a window rather than tell the reporters what he knows--which are generated spontaneously and without much reference to the pattern of the play. The murder as pointed out by able Arthur "Ruhl of the New York Herald Tribune starts as a tragic figure and ends in savage comedy. Not content to be general, the authors of The Front Page with the instinct of reporters for precision have made their mayor William Hale Thompson. But with all its impedimenta of satire, melodrama, superfluous action and uncertainty of mood, The Front Page never quite loses its pace or its direction.

George S. Kaufman directed the play; he has beaten it until it goes smoothly at top speed. The acting is more exactly true now than it was during the tryout period (TIME, June 4). Osgood Perkins,* who plays the city editor, could probably hold down the job on an offstage newssheet, so completely has he mastered the dirty tricks of his trade. The Front Page is full of expletives and nursery words such as all reporters use outside their writings. These, if understood, will cause horror to the imbecile portion of the theatre-going public and will probably later be deleted from the dialog. But The Front Page is not one of those delicately perfect scrolls in which a changed syllable would mean destruction. Noisy, rapid, robust, exciting, and too true to be bad, it can stand a few unnecessary changes without wilting.

The Song Writer is a play whose meagre inspiration quite patently originated in the headline romance of famed Irving Berlin & Ellin Mackay. The composer in the play, David Bernard, is just such a wistful tinkler as his prototype appeared when the human interest hounds had finished their sport with him. The developments which follow his hasty wedding to an heiress are not included in the original. The bride of the minstrel is soon discovered in the apartment of another man, a man of her own haut-monde, who has a private bar and the idiotic cynicism which the drama conventionally imputes to the Social Register. Surprised by the song writer, his wife becomes hysterical and goes to Paris. In the last act, haunted by a melody called "You're Gone," in which David Bernard has expressed his unabatable regret, Mrs. Bernard comes back from Paris in time for a reconciliatory curtain.

Georgie Price, to suit whose vaudevillain talents the role was designed, pattered prettily through the path of his melodic romance. The heroine, Mayo Methot, was competent as an actress and very pretty, but neither she nor Mr. Price deserved the plaudits which Jennie Moscowitz received for the way she played the songster's mother. The bad ballads of David Bernard, some of them supplied by Georgie Price, seemed inadequate for their part in the plot but the hokum in Crane Wilbur's play was well suited to its theme. The pathos of the play, like its comedy, had a touch of the untrue, sudden and exaggerated glitter which illuminates Tin Pan Alley.

He Understood Women. He is Julien Remain, a boulevardier who boasted of his systematic passions; the women are mainly the Baroness LeLong, his momentary mistress, and Aline, her maid, who becomes Julien's wife, whom he distrusts in the second act and embraces in the third. Also there is a young soldier, lecherous and dressed in blue. Nothing in the play, its characters, its situations or its continental idiom is fresh or interesting. It is a spurious attempt to be nice and naughty by one Frances Lynch and by Michael Kallesser who last spring so soberly and slowly gave companionate weddings a bite on the nose in Marriage on Approval.

*He has previously played in: Spread Eagle, Women Go on Forever, Weak Sisters, Beggar on Horseback.