M-G-M's Three Comrades, adapted from Erich Maria Remarque's novel of postwar Germany. Frank Borzage directed an excellent cast. In particular, Margaret Sullavan's performance as the doomed girl was beautiful and touching.
Despite the two million dollars that 20th CenturyFox put into the production, Suez, featuring. Tyrone Power, Loretta Young, and Annabella, didn't quite come off.
When Walt Disney announced his intention of making a feature-length animated cartoon, to cost nearly two million dollars, his sincerest well-wishers told him that he was crazy. In the first place, the public wouldn't sit through so long a cartoon; in the second place, an adult audience certainly wouldn't sit through a fairy tale, and the juvenile audience wasn't large enough to pay for the cost of production. Disney listened politely, and released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which promptly broke attendance records all over America, grossed about eight million dollars, played in forty-one different countries, and had a sound track in ten different languages.
Snow White had everything--magic, animals, love interest, menace, comedy, and pathos. A special Academy award went to Disney in 1938 for this picture.
Algiers was the American version of a French film Pepe le Moko, and it featured two lovely girls: Sigrid Gurie and the Viennese Hedy Lamarr, whose extraordinary beauty so hypnotized the spectators that they didn't care whether or not she could act.
The acting was provided by Charles Boyer, whose undeniable talent and brooding Latin charm did to the female onlookers what Hedy Lamarr did to the male ones by Gene Lockhart, who played the villain.
Ginger Rogers had another straight acting art in Vivacious Lady, and she and James Stewart delighted the customers with this comedy.
Frank Capra did a wonderful job of direction when he brought George S. Kaufman's and Moss Hart's lunatic play, You Can't Take It With You, to the screen. The father who pays no income tax because he doesn't approve of it; the mother who paints, but who took up writing because somebody delivered a typewriter at the house by mistake; the boarder who makes fireworks in the basement; the son who plays the vibraphone; the daughter who mistakenly thinks she can dance--they were all there, and funnier than ever.
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