Frequent horror movie actor Lionel Atwill plays it straight in The Firebird (1934), an adaptation of the play by Lajos Zilahy, a Broadway flop in 1932 but a hit on stages in London and Paris. As a decent Viennese family man who must face the grim reality that either his beloved wife (Verree Teasdale) or his young daughter (Anita Louise) is responsible for the murder of a caddish actor (Ricardo Cortez), Atwill is streets away from the lunacy he evoked in such Pre-Code shockers as Doctor X (1932), Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), and Murders in the Zoo (1933). Curiously, Atwill was a last minute replacement for Colin Clive, former star of Universal's Frankenstein (1931), whose once promising career was at this point on the decline due to longstanding physical ailments and a growing dependence on alcohol. (Even more curious is that the Atwill/Clive role was played in Firebird's regional US tour by that other madman of American horror movies, George Zucco.) Directed by German expatriate William Dieterle, The Firebird splits the difference between whodunit and society soap opera and offers solid support work by such familiar faces as Jane Darwell, Robert Barrat, and C. Aubrey Smith, as the cop on the case. Igor Stravinsky sued Warner Brothers for its unlicensed use of his unrelated "The Firebird Suite" in their film but a French court awarded the celebrated Russian composer only one franc in damages.

By Richard Harland Smith