The Moviegoer

"Box office poison" is a charge not likely to be hurled again at Marlene Dietrich now that she has stopped wandering about the desert, strewn with ethereal white veils, and has made the transition to saloon hostess in the good old American Wild West. "Destry Rides Again," her latest vehicle, presents her in a rough and tumble burlesque of the dime quickies of the twenties. Dietrich, it will be generally conceded, has certain natural qualifications for the job of combination Mac West and Alice Faye: Hollywood has provided a script in the right mood; and the result is a motion picture capable of popularizing anything in a dress (Shirley Temple and the Dionne Quintuplets perhaps excepted.)

Success of "Destry Rides Again" is all the more remarkable when one considers that its thesis is the superiority of peaceful methods over violence. Into a wide open town, with its typical saloon characters, comes James Stewart, or Thomas Jefferson Destry, whose father was killed in the course of sherifling a similar frontier town. He believes in law and order, but not in coercion: and "no-gun Destry," as the hombres come to call him, talks the crooks into prison and the town into somnolence. His adventures, except for a few moments of sentimental seriousness, constitute a picture which must certainly come close to exhausting the possibilities of satirical slapstick comedy.