Word: barthelmess
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Cabin in the Cotton (First National) is a serious drama of the South's cotton belt, full of violence undramatically organized. As the poor tenant farmers' emancipator, Richard Barthelmess lifts his shining face toward a new day when landlords and tenants will "co-operate." Out of Henry Harrison Kroll's novel, able Southern Playwright Paul Green (In Abraham's Bosom, The House of Connelly) has sneaked into the cinema a good playwright's impartiality. The philosophy of the picture is that the rich are bad and the poor are bad, but the rich are bad because nobody has told them...
...Richard Barthelmess, son of a tenant farmer who dies of the scrabble for existence, educates himself with the rich landlord's help, becomes the landlord's man. The poor steal the rich man's cotton, kill his men, burn down his store. The rich man juggles the accounts to keep the poor in debt to him, takes part in lynching a poor man. Each side looks to Barthelmess to betray the other. He snubs a tenant girl's (Dorothy Jordan's) clean love as he succumbs to the unholy temptations of the landlord's daughter (Bette Davis). When the burning...
Even with Paul Green's sincere writing, Barthelmess' well-intentioned acting, Director Michael Curtiz' occasionally striking photography, Cabin in the Cotton fails to excite with its cinematically new problem, treatment and landscape. The sweet, empty face of honey-haired Bette Davis is notably effective in a villainess part. Excellent shot: the lynching party following bloodhounds along the top of a ridge screened by bare trees...
...Except Scarf ace, completed early in the year, there were almost none which cost more than $300,000; none, like Trader Horn, which cost $1,000,000 or more. All producers cut office salaries; most producers tried to cut the salaries of employes under contract. George Arliss and Richard Barthelmess reduced their own salaries. James Cagney last week quit Hollywood because his pay was not increased (see p. 26). Also last week Ina Claire retired from the cinema to return to the stage. Her reason: "I didn't have my say. I took the movies too seriously...
...Alias the Doctor," probably the better of the two, is the vehicle selected for the restricted abilities of Richard Barthelmess. Since the atmosphere is melodrama and the theme is medicine, where else can such icy voiced and tendril fingered experts exist as those of Austria; so Bathelmess becomes Muller, and Richard, Karl. And thus before a background of beer steins, rambling stucco farmhouses, operating rooms and music boxes, Karl Muller develops as the boy who loves the soil but is forced to become a surgeon. Complication after complication is thrown in to keep awake a sleepy audience, but the chief...