The film industry has produced many men of talent, but few artists. Mamoulian has always seemed to me one of those rare men. The picture of first love in Applause, of crime in City Streets, of the macabre in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, all had about them a distinction that transcended their Hollywood setting. His latest film Love Me To-night … shows what he can make of an old story in new dress, and more sensationally, perhaps, what he can make of Chevalier. Love Me To-night is a latter-day version of The Sleeping Beauty, with Chevalier as a tailor's apprentice, who bursts into a ducal château to get a bill paid, and carries off a princess dying of ennui and inbreeding.

Such a treatment of an old tale lends itself to facetiousness, the facetiousness of Mark Twain or of Will Rogers. But Mamoulian can keep this side...