(3 of 4)
an elderly apple vendor
named Mrs. Nellie McCarthy to have her hair marcelled, lunch at the
Waldorf-Astoria in a silk dress. To exploit Bureau of Missing
Persons, First National promised, in advertisements, to pay $10,000 to
Manhattan's missing Judge Joseph F. Crater in case he asked for it in
person at the box office. Detectives from the Manhattan Police
Department's Bureau of Missing Persons—whose Captain John H. Ayers
wrote Missing Men on which the picture is based—were on hand to
identify Judge Crater. He failed to appear. Unlike Captain Ayers' book,
the picture has a plot—about a brash detective named Butch Saunders
(Pat O'Brien) who falls in love with a girl (Bette Davis) who comes in
to ask about a missing husband. Presently Butch Saunders learns the
Chicago Police Department wants the girl for murder; then that the
man she is looking for is not really her husband but the person she has
been accused of shooting. All this is as engrossing as the normal
detective cinema but what gives Bureau of Missing Persons substance and
makes it interesting journalism as well as adequate fiction are
convincing shots of how a Missing Persons Bureau works. Captain Webb
(Lewis Stone), Butch Saunders' superior, is a skillful and intelligent
policeman. The picture shows him giving good advice to a child
violinist, a man with an overenthusiastic wife, a fussy old bachelor
who has lost his housekeeper, an old lady whose daughter has run away.
If disappointed because no Judge Crater came for the $10,000 last week,
First National nonetheless had reason to be satisfied with its
advertising trick. Captain Ayers, who saw the picture while waiting for
claimants to appear, pronounced it authentic and ingenious,
complimented Actor Stone, pointed out that his underlings, unlike
Captain Webb's, are forbidden to chew gum. Penthouse
(Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Cinemaddicts who have never been there must have
confused ideas about Manhattan. Lady for a Day exhibits the city as a
paradise for addle-headed apple vendors. Bureau of
Missing Persons show's gentle detectives tenderly dissuading vague
citizens from intentional amnesia (see above). In Penthouse the New
Yorkers are types with whom cinemaddicts should be more familiar—two
important gangsters, a socialite lawyer and miscellaneous strumpets,
all briskly engaged in alcoholism, murder and adultery. Lawyer
Jackson Durant (Warner Baxter) loses his fiancee because she
disapproves of his friendship with a jolly gangster named Tony Gazotti.
Not especially disheartened, Lawyer Durant presently has a chance to
laugh last. His fiancée's next admirer (Phillips Holmes) is accused of
murdering a onetime sweetheart at a penthouse party. The real
murderer is another gangster, rival to Gazotti, named Jim Crelliman
(C. Henry Gordon). Lawyer Durant brings him to justice, forms what
looks like a lasting attachment with the sleek underworld girl (Myrna
Loy) who helps him. Adapted from a story by Arthur Somers Roche and
ably directed by William S. Van Dyke—whose specialty heretofore
has been wild animal pictures— Penthouse is good, straightforward
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayerdrama, with glass doors and modern furniture. Most
exciting shot: one of Crelliman's underlings (George E. Stone)
squeaking and wriggling when he gets the third degree. The Passion of
Joan of Arc (Société Général des Films), with
