champagne served by the butlers, and they sing "For He's
a Jolly Good Fellow," i.e., Bindy's dad. That amiable old
codger has in the meantime found out that Bindy really
loves Buzz, and he says, "Sure, if you want that whiskered
fool (i.e., Popper) reinstated, you can have him." Just so's
Bindy is happy. On the balcony, Bindy says, "Darling we'll
work together side by side," and then, as the fadeout sen-
tence, the punch line, Buzz adds, "But not like in ·Russia."
Soak the Rich
is doing feebly at the box office, but that is
the fate of art in America, and those few of you who have
seen it will testify that the account above leaves out the many
highlights and striking situations. Too, it must be confessed
that this writer was prevented from savoring it to the full
by lack of foresight in his choice of a companion. She was
a college radical who, as might have been expected, miscon-
strued the intention of Messrs. Hecht and MacArthur,
and
she booed and stamped throughout the picture. She thought
there was malice and slander in the implication that radicals
are in the habit of turning Party funds to very personal uses.
She thought there were some points hidden in making Bindy's
father lovable and the radicals either megalomaniacs or fool-
ish youngsters. She had gone through several anti-war strikes
and many more demonstrations,
but had yet to see the water-
hose turned on a harmless, fat dean. She had scarcely ever
killed a dean or seen a bomb, and she had drunk champagne
only once, and then under the delusion that it was ginger ale.
To the end she maintained that there was barbed purpose in
putting the few genuinely liberal, not communist, sentiments
of the script into the mouth of an empty-headed,
jeweled
heiress in love with a radical.
What she could not understand was that Ben Hecht and
Charles MacArthur are serious writers, independent of the
Hollywood philistines, social satirists admittedly intent on
producing a "hilarious satire on the foibles of all of us."
The fact that they happened to pick on Communists is inci-
dental, or else very possibly just Bolshevik self-criticism. We
know they are in favor of revolution, because their mouth-
piece in the picture says that "Revolution is only our current
young generation's form of necking." Necking is the Holly-
wood word for something else, something we all like to do,
something Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur
do have a
weakness for. And then in
Soak the Rich
they have defin-
itively wrecked the old slander of Stalin's being a dictator in a
sentence of singularly haunting quality and terseness that
many of our left-wing writers might well imitate: "The only
real Dictator is old Dan Cupid."
College radicals must not regard this picture as a slander
on their movement, and they must not misinterpret an occa-
sional good-natured slip on the part of Hecht-MacArthur,
because even the team's predecessor, Jonathan Swift, pulled
a boner in kidding Isaac Newton,
and great satire requires
boldness and freedom of interpretation.
In the compass of this piece it is possible to give only the
highlights of the movie month. There have been a few be-
sides
Soak the Rich.
Jean Harlow has confessed to an inter-
viewer that her diet seldom includes meat and that she has
an ambition to write. Dick Powell has published his final
intention to marry Joan Blondell. Ginger Rogers has been
given a commission in the Texas Navy. For the first time
there will be a close-up of Marlene Dietrich kissing, in the
film
Desire,
with Gary Cooper. And Harrison Carroll of
the New York
Daily Mirror
reports that Lupe Velez's tiny
chihuahua dog has just undergone a successful caesarian
operation. The George Arlisses are infanticipating.
EDWARD NEWHOUSE
BOOKS
Intellectual Ping-Pong
AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY TODAY AND TO-
MORROvV,
edited by Horace M. Kallen and Sidney
Hook.
Messrs. Kallen's and Hook's collection was apparently
made to order for that shrinking market which still goes in
for the intellectual rages of each season, flitting from psycho-
analysis to physics to the love-life of the Trobriand Islanders.
When the editors of this symposium selected their contribu-
tors, they must have had the tastes of such an audience in
mind. Consequently,
the reader finds Mr. Will Durant
popping up in the book to give an ecstatic appreciation of
"the vicarious exaltation of Bosanquet" and the "warm,
seductive charm of a
theory
of Aphrodite." Another con-
tributor, blurbed as the "Will Rogers of American philoso-
phy," adds the homely touch which makes such a symposium
human and marketable. And to make their: concoction pal-
atable for certain tastes, the editors have included an appro-
priate dash of religious apologia by Michael Williams,
a
touch of mysticism by Wilmot H. Sheldon and quite a lot
of old-fashioned nonsense by John Herman Randall, Jr.
Some degree of cuteness is thus achieved. But ~he volume
as a whole certainly does not give the "faithful picture of the
struggle of ideas and ideals in American life upon the plane
of philosophy" which the editors promise in their introduc-
tion. The twenty-five essays in the book have little connec-
tion with the mainstream of American life; they have even
less to offer in the way of a solution for the problems of the
day. With a few notable exceptions-Arthur
E. Murphy,
Ernest Nagel and Paul Weis~-the papers do not even touch
upon some of the interesting work being done in technical
branches of philosophy like logic and scientific method. Most
of the contributors rehash time-worn arguments about the
need for a science of ethics, the meanings of meaning and
the value of metaphysics. The results in a less respectable
field would be called bromides.
The confusion and general futility of the book reminds this
reviewer of a philosophy seminar that he once attended. The
atmosphere was the same as this symposium: the students
even resembled the contributors to the book. In the seminar
there was a Jewish student-down from New York because
this particular up.iversity could still find jobs for philosophy
instructors.
There was an engineer who had been overcome
by religious feelings and who had joined the department to
wrestle with his soul and ethics. There was a student from
a local Catholic college who had been sent to dip into profane
knowledge, so he could act as the devil's disciple in the
scholastic discussions of the priests. There was an Albanian
studying mathematics and compelled to attend because he
needed philosophy credits. Then there were a strange assort-
ment of old maids of both sexes, all making a life-work of
some pin-point in the history of primitivism.
The seminar dealt with various theories of time. The
G~eat-Mind-and-Campus-Terror
who lectured at us was
famous for having shown that there were thirteen kinds of
pragmatism in Dewey's philosophy and fifteen kinds of
romanticism in romanticism.
He demonstrated to us that
from a metaphysical point of view there were contradictions
PARTISAN
REVIEW AND ANVIL
