Sunday 26 February
The British FP-L production Love’s Boomerang opens at the Rialto cinema in New York.
The Rialto, on Times Square, was one of Famous Players-Lasky’s flagship theatres, built in 1916 and acquired by the company in 1919. Opening Love’s Boomerang there was a statement of intent, though not necessarily a demonstration of real confidence in the product. It was the work of John S. Robertson and Josephine Lovett, shot in the autumn of 1921, partly in France, and as yet unseen in Britain.
It was reviewed a few weeks later in Life magazine by Robert E. Sherwood, who professed himself an admirer of two of Robertson's previous pictures, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Sentimental Tommy, and called the new one a ‘pleasant story of life and love in a French traveling circus’, ‘well acted, and its backgrounds are delightful’.
Not then the magazine it became in the 1930s under Henry Luce, Life was a mostly humorous publication, virtually the house journal of the Algonquin ‘round table’ writers. As well as Sherwood as film critic, Robert Benchley was its theatre critic, and Dorothy Parker was a frequent contributor. Sherwood would work on Hitchcock's first Hollywood script, Rebecca, Robert Benchley would act in Foreign Correspondent, and Dorothy Parker would contribute to the script of Saboteur.