Cinema: The New Pictures: Dec. 28, 1931

Private Lives (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). "Certain women should be struck regularly—like gongs." In itself, this is not particularly witty. It is neither an epigram nor a wisecrack and anyone who made it at a dinner table would be lucky if it caused a smile. On the other hand, it is light-hearted and emphatic. Spoken by a cultivated young man to a lady with whom he is both in love and angry, it becomes funny. It illustrates the formula for Noel Coward's Private Lives, in which the author made his job easy by arranging his situations so...

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