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Based on Phyllis Bottome's best seller of a year ago, Private Worlds illustrates the sad truism that the distinction between doctors and their crackpots is often dangerously thin. Superintendent Monet has in tow his sister Claire (Helen Vinson), a nymphomaniac-murderess, whose misbehavior has prejudiced him against unattached young women generally. Psychiatrist Everest is living in what she calls a "ghost-world," still enamoured of a soldier shot for cowardice in the War. The efforts of these two to conquer their neuroses keep the asylum in an uproar. Before they succeed, Claire Monet has a liaison with a young neurologist (Joel McCrea) which sends his wife (Joan Bennett) into a bad fit of the stammers. A young maniac has snapped the superintendent's wrist. The matron of the institution has been discharged and rehired.
In The President Vanishes, his first picture for Paramount release (TIME, Dec. 17), Producer Walter Wanger attacked the subject of politics, tabooed by most of his confreres. Serious treatment of psychiatry is equally unheard of in the cinema because, while likely to baffle many cinemaddicts, it may fail to please those tories who still cling stubbornly to the creed that all films are made by and for intellectual ten-year-olds. If Private Worlds fails to earn its way at the box office, it would be unfortunate. As intelligent as it is unconventional, brilliantly acted, and directed by Gregory La Cava, it contrives to make the minor maladjustments of its leading characters as exciting as a melodrama. Good shot: inmates of the violent ward waking to watch Dr. Monet's struggle with an unruly patient.
George White's 1935 Scandals (Fox). George White's formula for his Broadway shows—the genial alternation of song & dance numbers with dramatized bawdy stories—has been modified with each successive version of his film Scandals without any modification of White himself. He is producer, director, writer and acts the lead in this show which tells how one George White, a great producer starting on a vacation, sees White's Scandals as produced in a Southern hamlet by one Elmer White (Ned Sparks). James Dunn and Alice Faye, the boy & girl leads in the rustic show, are so good that George White takes them back to Broadway where the story progresses through the routine steps to backstage anecdote—the split-up of a successful team, its consequent misfortunes and eventual reunion. No one cares much when the inconsequential story is interrupted to permit Eleanor Powell to do some sensational tap-dancing, or to offer Cliff Edwards in a good production number in which he dreams of being Romeo to a beautiful Juliet and Mark Antony to a devastating Cleopatra only to find, on waking, that he is married to a very plain woman. The rest of the time one is safe in expecting chorines in Southern costume for a number called "It's An Old Southern Custom," and a property moon for Dunn and Faye to swing on while they chant "According to the Moonlight." The dialog, largely composed by White on the set, probably owes its shamefaced air to the fact that it does not contain a single double-entendre.