Sat

30/06

Jolly Cinema > 11:30

ONE MORE SPRING

Henry King

Projection
Info

Saturday 30/06/2018
11:30

Subtitle

Original version with subtitles

ONE MORE SPRING

Film Notes

One of the last films to be released by Fox Film Corporation before the financially endangered studio merged with Darryl Zanuck’s independent 20th Century Pictures, One More Spring was a personal project for its director, Henry King, who considered it “probably his best picture, in a way”, according to a 1937 interview in the “New York Times”. Adapted from a literary novel by Robert Nathan, the film is set in a studio stylized Central Park, where a tool shed becomes a shelter against the raging Depression for a group of assorted outcasts – including an unemployed actress (Janet Gaynor), a bankrupt antiques dealer (Warner Baxter), a Jewish musician in exile from Hitler’s Europe (Walter Woolf King) and a banker who has defaulted on his depositors (Grant Mitchell). Staged with King’s characteristic simplicity and sincerity, this gently uplifting comedy has some of the flavor of the Popular Front film emerging simultaneously in France, imagining unexpected alliances across class barriers in the face of economic devastation (“The photoplay”, sniffed the “New York Times”, “is abnormally kind to the banking profession, revealing its members as misunderstood altruists whose hearts crack with sympathy when their savings institutions fail”). Filmed as the Depression was taking a new, freshly devastating downturn, the film’s minimalistic settings seem also to reflect the economic reality of Fox Film, as the leaderless studio drifted through its final year of existence.

Dave Kehr

Cast and Credits

Sog.: dal romanzo omonimo di Robert Nathan. Scen.: Edwin Burke. F.: John F. Seitz. M.: Harold D. Schuster. Scgf.: Jack Otterson. Mus.: Arthur Lange. Int.: Janet Gaynor (Elizabeth Cheney), Warner Baxter (Jaret Otkar), Walter Woolf King (Morris Rosenberg), Grant Mitchell (Mr. Sheridan), Jane Darwell (Mrs. Sweeney), Roger Imhof (Mr. Sweeney), Rosemary Ames (Miss Weber). Prod.: Winfield R. Sheehan per Fox Film Corporation. DCP. D.: 87’. Bn.