AT THE PARAMOUNT AND FENWAY

Paramount and Fenway this week spend their evenings alternately donning buskin and sock in a felicitous double bill of "The Informer" and "Her Master's Voice". Victor McLaglen's astonishing ascent from his usual dead-pan broken-nose roles to his characterization of an informer in the Black and Tan uprisings in Dublin in 1922, giving away his pal to the police for the reward, attempting to drown his remorse in a night of mighty and generous carousal, and finally, confronted with the incontrovertible fact of his treachery, fleeing the vengeance of his pal's friends, only to be shot down and to die a bewildered repentant at the foot of an altar, is a source of wonderment. One can only regret that his histrionic ability has not been utilized before. With his powerful physique and mobile, ugly countenance he is excellently adapted to this tale of an inexorable destiny marching with ever increasing rapidity to brutal resolution.

The technique of the many short scenes and shots gives an insatiable and horrible rhythm to the play, a rhythm reinforced and given a high tragic emphasis by the force and poignant vigor of McLaglen's acting. The gloom of the foggy night with its almost animate compulsion of remorse and terror and repentance and the tale of revolutionary passion in the furtive Republican Army provide a grim warp along which the fate of the informer is woven with almost classical measuredness and tragic purpose. It is unfortunate that the construction is not a little more closely knit. The reason for his deed--the salvation from the streets of a woman he loved--and the horror of his remorse, which spends the blood money in wanton and maddened drunken roistering, are not quite boldly enough emphasized. But that is a retrospective fault. It is a splendid play, and McLaglen is excellent. Margot Grahame and Heather Angel lend tearful vividity to the general gloom. All in all, it is not hard to understand the extraordinary acclaim given this picture last year by professional and popular critics alike.

"Her Master's Voice" is more Edward Everett Horton. He gets into trouble with his wife, and then he gets out. But the present solution, which allows him to regain her wifely confidence by the simple expedient of his finding fame and fortune as a crooner, The Fireside Troubadour, and hence being in a position to dictate terms, gives a gay and irresponsible twist to this new story of the trials of Horton. Laura Hope Crews plays the repressed and libidinous aunt to Peggy Conklin, his estranged wife.