Word: madelon
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Once a Lady (Paramount). While her son is reaching his majority in The Sin of Madelon Claude t, Helen Hayes changes from a blooming peasant girl into a shrunken harridan, withered and stringy with age (TIME, Nov. 9). In Once a Lady, Ruth Chatterton survives the years which it takes her daughter to grow up without developing a single wrinkle. Both heroines pass the intervening period in more or less persistent prostitution. The fact that dissipation has a less damaging effect upon Ruth Chatterton may be regarded as a tribute to the durability of the First Lady of the Cinema...
...plot is in the same pattern as Madame X and Madelon Claudet. Prom- ising an estranged husband (Geoffrey Kerr) to support a fortuitous rumor that she is dead. Miss Chatterton disappears into the Parisian demimonde. Years later she threatens to reveal that she is still alive and resentful when he refuses to let their grown-up daughter marry. Cinemas in which the climax arrives only with the maturity of the heroine's offspring are likely to be long drawn out. This one, though Ruth Chatterton acts well and ably affects a Russian accent, seems as long as two ordinary cinemas...
...Madelon Claudet (Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer) is remarkable because in it Helen Hayes appears in cinema for the first time and because it succeeds in its intention?to make audiences weep...
...drums up her trade without ever making the error of playing for the audience's sympathy. The picture is well directed by Edgar Selwyn, splendidly acted by the rest of the cast?particularly by Jean Hersholt as an old physician who, towards the end of the picture, meets Madelon Claudet running away from her son's house...
...Helen Hayes's greatest success was Coquette. The run of that play was terminated by a celebrated act of God?the birth of Helen Hayes's daughter?over which there was an Actors Equity suit. Her husband. Playwright Charles MacArthur (see The Unholy Garden) worked up the script of Madelon Claudet (from the stage play The Lulla-by). A jolly, practical jokester, he once wrote a speech abusing drama critics, gave it to his wife to read over the radio when it was too late for her to change. Helen Hayes is two years younger than the 20th Century...