Currently at the University, "The Toast of New York" ranks high in entertainment, low as an artistic production. One fact probably follows from the other. For while a cast including Edward Arnold, Frances Farmer, Cary Grant, and Jack Oakie aims to please every taste, presence of such diverse and typed stars would without well-knit plot tend to disrupt any film into a series of bit performances. Such actually takes place, as the producers did not make out over well with their plot.

Two aspects of Jim Fisk's life have drawn the camera's focus alternately, his financial career and his career with Josie Mansfield. Getting off to a fast start with some able stooging by Grant and Oakie, Arnold appears on his way to another of his masterful, belly-laughing characterizations, this time of the late Jay Gould's spectacular compeer. But enter love. Miss Farmer's rather self-conscious poignancy upsets the emotional possibilities inherent in Fisk's Wall Street development. Then set for a satisfyingly tragic romance amid the triangle of Arnold in love with Farmer in love with Grant in love with Farmer but faithful to Arnold, the watcher is again disturbed by the reappearance of the financial Fisk in an incomplete version of Black Friday.

Everyone may have done his best, but the task of spreading plot and characterization evenly has proved too difficult.

On the entertainment side, Miss Farmer's beauty, Mr. Arnold's laughter, Mr. Grant's clothes, Mr. Oakie's face, and the naive antics of post-Civil War Wall Street speed the picture's pace. Donald Meek provides an amusing if untrue underdog Daniel Drew. Hauntingly the refrain of "The First Time I Saw You" pervades the whole.

Also on the program is "Marry the Girl," with Hugh Herbert and Mary Boland, which is neither more nor less than what is expected. Each player overdoes his specialty giggle in a trite plot.