If Mr. Zanuck really believes for a minute that New York is favorably impressed by the shoving and hysteria of a squad of special police screaming at his other guests to make way for what they termed at the tops of their voices to be “the stars,” he is mistaken. The average film mumper attempting an imitation of the manners, comportment and attire of accustomed urbanity, is at best a study in farce technique, and when his low comedy entrance to a theater is accompanied by platoons of hired and utterly unjustified police, his comedy becomes a public offense. No cinema personality has ever yet required the escort or protection of police. If their persons are manhandled by what pass for admirers, it is no more than the accomplishment of what their press agents have for years been hired to implement, and constitutes the achievement of their fondest dreams of success.
Some years ago the late Don Skene, a sports writer of vindictive wit who once became embroiled with the police in the course of a Longacre Square tumult, afterward explained that he had been “arrested for resisting a Shubert opening.” The remark is pertinent to the technique by which the tasteless tycoons of Hollywood attempt to dragoon theater goers into admiration of their usually shiftless wares, which consists of hustling them into an auditorium with the loud cries and stampings by which beaters are accustomed to spread terror and dismay among wild animals and then, once the unhappy audience is tightly wedged into its seats, of locking the fire doors, stationing guards at the gangways and refusing exit or intermission to anyone for three entire hours. There never was a film yet devised worth three hours out of the life of any man, let alone three hours of confinement with dubious company in the dark. Actually, in order to escape the dreary domesticities of The Best Years of Our Lives, this department was forced to engage in a fistic skirmish with a goon stationed at a fire exit with explicit instructions that none of the audience be allowed to make a getaway until the damned dull show was over.
In the midst of these skirmishes with Hollywood's pretensions and the shouted and virginal protestations of a loud Miss Paris of 1431 in the person of Ingrid Bergman, theater goers had one evening of complete competence and superiority in every department of the stage when they encountered Lillian Hellman's Another Part of the Forest, which she had devised as a sort of antecedent sequel to The Little Foxes. Even if first nighters hadn't already been driven to a practically necessary alcoholism by the preposterous Miss Bergman and the triumphant smugness of Mr. Goldwyn, Miss Hellman's play would have been an engaging charade. As it was, with the spectators hoping the next patriotic virgin to appear on stage might be done to death with hammers right in front of their eyes, Miss Hellman's assorted scoundrels, spies, murderers, whores, traitors and idiots in the Alabama seventies assumed a sort of lyric charm, an almost transcendent plausibility.
The only even tolerably good person in Another Part of the Forest is almost completely demented, which also goes for Maxwell Anderson's Joan of Lorraine, but there, by incredible good fortune, the similarity ends, and Miss Hellman concerned herself with the various villainies and ambitions which made the murderous and rapacious Hubbard family what it later was to become in The Little Foxes.
Space here doesn't permit of any synopsis of Another Part of the Forest. Simply the play shows how the founder of the Hubbard fortunes, who had somewhat sketchily made a good thing out of the War of the States even though he was a Southerner, is black mailed into bankruptcy by the members of his own family who, in turn, set the stage for their own undoing in Miss Hellman's later play. There is no altogether virtuous or sane character in the entire play, a circumstance which would in itself recommend it if only by contrast to its Broadway contemporaries, even without Miss Hellman's good writing and superlative cast. The Hubbards are rapidly getting ahead in American society, and Miss Hellman promises new triumphs for them in the third play of a fully rounded trilogy.
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