Up From Jew Street

(See front cover)

The House of Rothschild (Twentieth Century) begins with old Mayer Amschel Rothschild (George Arliss, in whiskers and skullcap) as a wheedling Frankfort moneybroker. The loss of a few gulden in a messenger robbery sets him yowling like an alley cat. When the tax-collector comes down Jew Street, stingy old Rothschild whisks his money bags into the cellar, gives each of his children a crust to gnaw, pops the roastbeef into a garbage box. and talks the collector into taking a bribe. As shrewd as he is stingy, Mayer Amschel Rothschild gets a good idea on his death bed. He tells his five sons to found banking houses in the five greatest cities in Europe. Nathan Rothschild (George Arliss), third son of Mayer Amschel, is less disreputable than his father but no less clever. Head of the London branch, he arranges to have his brothers in Frankfort, Vienna, Paris and Naples support the Allies against Napoleon. By the time Napoleon goes to Elba Rothschild and the Duke of Wellington (C. Aubrey Smith) are great friends. When Wellington tells him the Allies propose a loan to rehabilitate France, Rothschild bids but fails to get the loan. Baron Ledrantz (Boris Karloff) collaborates with Metternich and Talleyrand to assign the bonds to gentile bankers. Greatly provoked, Nathan Rothschild sells government bonds of his own to depress the market and prevent the offering of any new ones. Thus he compels Ledrantz to assign him the whole loan, sends the market up again.

Amid all this international finance Nathan Rothschild is not too preoccupied with his moneybags to observe a subplot which Producer Darryl Zanuck is hatching under his nose. His pretty daughter Julie (Loretta Young) has become attached to Wellington's aide. Captain Fitzroy (Robert Young). When his treatment in the matter of the loan convinces Nathan Rothschild that even in England Jews have an inferior social status, he forbids their marriage, sends Julie off to visit her grandmother (Helen Westley) in Frankfort. When he arrives there for a visit, there are riots in the Ghetto, instigated by sulky Baron Ledrantz. To save his fellow Jews from further persecution. Nathan Rothschild is almost ready to humble himself by appealing to Ledrantz when word arrives, by his secret method of communication, that Napoleon has landed in France and is mobilizing an army.

This is the signal for Nathan Rothschild's greatest coup. First he extracts from the Allies a promise to give Jews citizenship. Then he agrees to lend them all the Rothschild money. On the morning of Waterloo Rothschild is in a bad way. There is a panic on the London stock exchange. If the market breaks completely. Rothschild will be bankrupt. He pops on to the floor, places in his buttonhole a flower given him by Mrs. Rothschild (Mrs. Arliss) and orders his agents to buy. Presently, there arrives from the battlefield a message that Napoleon has lost. When next seen. Nathan Rothschild is at court with his wife, wondering on which knee to kneel while being knighted. His daughter Julie is engaged to marry Captain Fitzroy and the chains have been removed from Frankfort's Jew Street.

Shrewdly timed to touch obliquely on current Jew-baitings in Germany and mishaps on the stock exchange, The House of Rothschild is an historical picture in the grand manner, conducted with splendid energy and style. "Dignity" is what old Mayer Amschel Rothschild advises his sons to acquire. The picture, like Nathan Rothschild, is dignified without being stupid. As squealing little Julie Rothschild, Loretta Young manages to be gay without appearing to have stepped into pro-Victorian England out of a Ziegfeld chorus. C. Aubrey Smith is excellent as Wellington. As old Mrs. Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who gets the wittiest lines Nunnally Johnson was able to pack into his script, Helen Westley is superb. Called upon to explain why she has lived so long, she answers, with a muddled sense of finance, by saying: "Why should God take me at 88 when He can get me at 100?" George Arliss has been playing another Jew. Disraeli, for so long and under so many names, that he cannot step completely and instantly out of his most famed role. His hauteur, his bandy-legged walk, his hawk nose and his sloping shoulders suit a proud, gererous, clever banker even better than they do a British prime minister. After this picture the chances are even that most cinemaddicts will think of him in terms of Rothschild rather than of Disraeli.

When, three weeks ago, a British court awarded Russian Princess Youssoupov $126,800 on the ground that the cinema Rasputin libeled her, it opened Hollywood's eyes to a vista of disastrous possibilities. If superior courts uphold her claim, all the connections or descendants of famed characters in all the historical pictures, which are currently the cinema's most profitable fashion, might sue for damages. But the Rothschild descendants who are today one of Europe's most potent banking families are not likely to drag Producer Zanuck into court. Although the picture treats the founder of the dynasty harshly and makes Nathan a sentimental parvenu, its general temper is complimentary and its continuity closer to fact than most efforts of its kind.

The founder of the House of Rothschild was 'Mayer Amschel, son of Amschel Moses Bauer. He was a dealer in coins, curios and jewels. The earliest Rothschilds lived in a double house in Frankfort's Jew Street. They took their name from a red shield which hung outside their part of the house. On the same street, behind the sign of a ship, lived the ancestors of the late great Jacob Schiff whose grandson was last week engaged to a daughter of the great gentile banking house of Baker (see p. 60). The Rothschild invention of branch banking was not made by Amschel on his death bed. It evolved when Nathan, ablest of Mayer's sons, set out for England to seek his fortune, wrote home for more money to buy goods.

The Rothschilds did found five banking houses in the era of the Napoleonic Wars. Shrewd enough to guess that Napoleon could not last, they supported the Allies for reasons of good business rather than sentiment. Nathan Rothschild, no bosom friend of Wellington, did bid for a loan to France after Napoleon's first defeat, sent the market down by selling his own government bonds when his bid was refused. Statesmen like Metternich had, as the picture shows, agreed with Baring Brothers, London bankers, to handle some of the bonds privately for their own profit. When Rothschild sent the prices down, Baring Brothers called on the statesmen to put up the cash for their securities. When they failed to do so, the loan fell through entirely.

The romance between Wellington's aide and Julie Rothschild is fictitious. Not so the picture's explanation of the Rothschilds' famed system of secret communications. The Rothschilds did get news before anyone else; they got it, so far as anyone knows, not only by pigeon-post but from a fleet of channel boats which Nathan Rothschild ran partly for smuggling and partly as a private news link with France. A paunchy, mysterious combination of Jesse Livermore and the elder Morgan, he appeared on the London stock exchange not on the day of Waterloo but on the day after the battle. The legend went about that he had seen the battle himself; the long face he wore made traders think that Wellington had been defeated. In the panic Rothschild profited, as the picture shows, by purchasing sound securities cheap but his activities as a patriotic moneychanger got him no British knighthood. Contemporary Rothschilds might not like the fact that The House of Rothschild makes their ancestor more of a national hero than a level-headed banker but they would be less likely than old Nathan himself to resent the portrait which the picture furnishes of him. Nathan was rude, uneasy, eccentric. He made patrician callers asking for loans wait for hours in his anterooms. One of his confreres on the London exchange said: "There is a rigidity . . . which would make you fancy, if you did not see that it was not so, that someone was pinching him behind, and that he was either ashamed or afraid to say so. . . ." George Arliss makes Nathan Rothschild a colorful, curious and dramatic character and. like all Arliss heroes, a gentleman. False is the notion that the career of George Arliss is based upon a trick of impersonating celebrated historical characters whom he chances to resemble. He was born in Bloomsbury, London, in 1868. He and his small cronies, the Soutar brothers, Henry and Joseph, who became well-known British actors, used to give plays in a basement. Says George Arliss in his autobiography: "We could seat eight comfortably but seldom succeeded in getting a full house. Often we had only one but we made an effort to get at least two because we found it easier to work on the emotions of a crowd than on a single individual." Arliss found his father's publishing business tedious, persuaded an actor friend to let him be an "extra gentleman" with the Elephant and Castle Stock Company in London. At 23, Arliss was playing Old Comedies (The Rivals, The Road to Ruin, She Stoops to Conquer) at Margate. In the company was a pretty girl named Florence Montgomery. One afternoon they both ran into the empty theatre to get out of a shower. Arliss's description of what happened: "It may not be easy to bring about these conditions--the combination of rain and an empty theatre. ... If it can be done, results come quickly. I should imagine that in my case, the whole thing didn't take more than four minutes but there she was, at the end of that time, mine forever." In 1901 Arliss arrived in the U. S. with Mrs. Patrick Campbell for a season's tour. He stayed for 20 years. In 1908 he had his first starring part, in The Devil by young Ferenc Molnar. Two years later Producer George Tyler persuaded Louis Parker. English dramatist and composer, to write a play about Disraeli. Arliss played it for five years--two in Manhattan, two in large U. S. cities, one in one-night stands. President Taft used to say that after he went to a play the first thing he asked himself was whether it was as good as Disraeli. When Arliss hurt his hand and had to do all his business with one arm, there arose a legend that Disraeli had paralysis. Compared to Disraeli, The Green Goddess was a failure; Arliss played it for only three years. Old English in which skinny Arliss was a hard-drinking, robust old Tory, was his greatest financial success on the stage. In Hollywood, George Arliss is an extraordinary personage. He stops work every afternoon for a cup of tea, goes home at 4:30 no matter what the cast is doing. His director always addresses him as Mr. Arliss. He dresses in narrow trousers and a high stiff collar, carries change in a purse. Because he and his wife once saw some cattle starving in a drought, Arliss is a vegetarian. His theory ("I eat nothing I can pat") puts fish on his menu. He keeps an elaborate research library to help him with costume parts. He rehearses privately for two weeks before every picture, takes his wife's advice about makeup. She plays in his pictures only when, as in Rothschild, she can appear as his devoted wife. George Arliss's monocle, originally an affectation but now a necessity, has worn deep grooves around his right eye. He has never been known to break one. He gets exercise by walking, followed slowly by his car and chauffeur so that when tired after four miles outbound he can ride home. The clock on his dressing table is 250 years old. He used it in Alexander Hamilton. Most of the characters whom Arliss has portrayed with the greatest success have been infidels. He is a practicing Episcopalian, head of the Episcopal Actors Guild. At 66, he is provoked by being classed with superannuated mummers like Otis Skinner and De Wolfe Hopper. As a loyal British subject he still entertains hopes of being knighted.

P:Scandals (Fox) is a mass of trivia garnishing the backstage romance of Jimmy Martin (Rudy Vallee) and Kitty Donnelly (Alice Faye), a romance almost put asunder by a Park Avenue hussy (Adrienne Ames). As he croons, Vallee regards the onetime cabaret girl whom Mrs. Vallee recently named as corespondent in a suit for divorce with saucer eyes, but otherwise comports himself with poise and wooden dignity. Pelican-nosed Jimmy Durante fondles a wooden duck, raspingly sings ''My Dog Loves Your Dog."

The trifling story was written and directed by George White, who cast himself in the role of George White, celebrated producer. Mr. White's initial attempt to transmute the warm fleshliness of his revues to the screen suffers the same cold fate as other Hollywood musicomedies. Original ideas such as garden-frocked girls dancing across stepping stones in a pond, or a chorus of 100 carrying assorted dogs in their arms, are made tedious by end less elaborations. Typical shot: miniature chorus girl perched on the rim of a screen-high champagne glass. P:The Show Off (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). George Kelly's biography of a braggart was voted the best play of 1923 by the Pulitzer Prize play jury. In this modernized cinema version it is likely to recapture much of its old popularity. Though Spencer Tracy at times stoops to tricks for audience sympathy which the late Louis John Bartels spurned, most of the fun of the Kelly crucifixion of J. Aubrey Piper still shines through the Hollywood edition. J. Aubrey Piper attracts the admiration of Amy Fisher (Madge Evans) when, during a rescue, he is accidentally pushed into Manhattan harbor and credited with a lifesaving. He courts her in expensive cars, inspects mansions for a new residence, boasts of his railroad holdings, marries her. The cars were demonstrators and he is a $32.50 railway clerk. Soon in debt, with his salary garnisheed. they move in on the Fisher family, where his asinine laughs, platitudes and backslapping madden his sardonic mother-in-law. J. Aubrey loses his job, wrecks a borrowed car, is cast off by his wife. By stupid luck he muddles out of his despair to remain the same conceited show-off to the end. Good shot: P:Ma & Pa Fisher after the wedding reading Aubrey's travel folders on Waikiki Beach, the Taj Mahal and the Riviera while the honeymooners embark on the night boat to Albany.

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