Song-&-Dancies

One of the difficulties of photographing musical comedies is that the camera's eye, when near enough to a chorus to show whether the girls are good looking or not, is only wide enough to take in five girls abreast. Another is that there is no adequate way of grading sounds so that the singing of the ensemble at the back of he stage will be less sonorous than that of the principals at the footlights. Another is that musical comedies depend for much of their effect on color, and color-production in cinemas has not yet been perfected even as well as sound. Last week three new singing-&-dancing pictures met these difficulties with varying success:

The Cocoanuts (Paramount). The libretto of Irving Berlin's four-year-old musical comedy is reproduced without many amendments and with some of the original cast. Mary Eaton and Oscar Shaw, who have always done well on Broadway, sound like people singing on an old phonograph record with a blunt needle. It is doubtful whether the urbane, uproarious clowning of the four Marx brothers will seem funny in districts rural enough to admire the routine dance-numbers. Best shot: a wheel-ballet from overhead.

Fox Movietone Follies of 1929 embeds a musical show in the conventional cinema story about an understudy who got her chance. Dancing intervals, punctuating the Negro comedy of Stepin Fetchit, get across by such not entirely original, but fairly effective devices as photographing all the girls' feet at once or all their eyes. One good color sequence partly makes up for mediocre tunes. Best shot: backstage hands on opening night.

On with the Show (Warner). The faint, yellowish color which tints this film most of the time well suits a musical show. Betty Compson is pretty and so are most of the other girls. Ethel Waters sings in her husky, exciting Negro voice. The story of backstage life is tedious, archaic, complicated. The music is about what you would get in a drawing-room operetta. In spite of these drawbacks, this picture is the most interesting of its type to date. Best shot: the ballet coming down a flight of stairs in feathers.