The New Pictures

Topaze (RKO). Professor Auguste Topaze (John Barrymore) at the beginning of this picture, is a shabby and bedazzled pedagog, soberly extolling to the urchins in his classroom the virtues of a copy book philosophy. At the end of the picture he is a gay boulevardier. dressed in a depraved cutaway and accompanied by a mistress (Myrna Loy) whom he has stolen from a baron. The transformation starts when Topaze loses his job for punishing the baron's stupid son. It is completed when the baron (Reginald Mason) has made Topaze head of a fraudulent mineral water company and has procured for him the Academic Palm, which the professor has spent a lifetime trying to win by honest means.

The wit of John Barrymore's performance makes Topaze one of the most ingratiating comedies of the past year, as it is certainly the most cynical. Good shot: the Barrymore eyebrow's working above a handkerchief which conceals his mouth when Topaze has just downed his first cocktail, including the olive, in one gulp.

What! No Beer? (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Most cinemaddicts in the U. S. find Jimmy Durante's exaggerated nose and chronic excitement an irresistibly comic combination. His frozen-faced teammate, Buster Keaton, is an attraction abroad where people cannot understand what either one is talking about. In this picture, misinterpreting radio reports of the election, Durante and Keaton purchase a brewery in the delusion that their enterprise is legal. Fortunately they are so incompetent that they make near beer in spite of themselves; when arrested, they are immediately set free. By acquiring an experienced braumeister, they are soon in dangerous rivalry with racketeers. They cap their misdemeanors by getting a whole town so sodden that when federal agents raid the brewery again, no evidence is left. What! No Beer? is certainly an incentive to lawlessness but it can be considered a triumph of comic invention only by the most ardent Keaton & Durante enthusiasts.

Hallelujah, I'm a Bum (United Artists --Joseph Schenck) was written by Ben Hecht, adapted by Samuel Behrman. scored by Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart. directed by Lewis Milestone and acted by, among others, Al Jolson.

The story is a frantic little fantasy about a collection of ne'er-do-wells who lead trampish lives in the shrubbery of Manhattan's Central Park; and particularly about their captain (Jolson) who knows the Mayor (Frank Morgan). Jolson finds a purse belonging to the Mayor's girl (Madge Evans), finds the girl herself when she has a stroke of amnesia, and restores her to her friend after falling in love with her himself.

The score, loaded with "rhythmic dialog" which was billed as a Rodgers-Hart invention, turns out to mean merely a superfluity of rhymes. Lewis Milestone's direction is graceful but undistinguished. Al Jolson's performance is notable for a great air of confidence, which is generally unjustified, and for the fact that he still wobbles his lower lip as though every other word in all his songs was Mammy.

Hallelujah, I'm a Bum can be regarded, like so many other Hollywood products by distinguished collaborators, as one more balloon tire with a blowout. It contains one exceedingly funny sequence--in which Frank Morgan, as the Mayor whose inebriation is even more chronic than that of his predecessors in the cinema, waggles his finger at Jolson, calls him a cad.

Al Jolson (Asa Yoelson) was born in Srednike, Russia, in 1886, youngest son of a Rabbi who came to the U. S. in 1890. taught Asa synagog singing in Washington D. C. Young Yoelson ran away from home before he was 20. barked for a circus, later went into vaudeville, blacking his face because he had noticed that crowds always laughed at black men. Such facts as these will be preserved in theatrical history not because, for 15 years thereafter, Al Jolson was the first and most famed Mammy singer in the U. S. nor because they supplied in part the basis for his first cinema, The Jazz Singer. Jolson and his career will be remembered because The Jazz Singer was the first sound picture ever made. It cost $500,000 and when it was released in Manhattan on Oct. 6, 1927, there were less than 100 theatres in the world equipped to show it. The success of The Jazz Singer definitely ended Hollywood's happiest era. launched the fortunes of Warner Brothers who produced it. established Al Jolson for a short time as the greatest personality in the amusement business.

Jolson's later pictures have been less successful but he still has most of the $2,000,000 which made him a few years ago reputedly the third richest actor in the world.*

* Richest is Charles Chaplin; second richest is Harold Lloyd.

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