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Claude Rains, whose hypnotist's face has worked, visibly and invisibly, in The Invisible Man, Crime Without Passion, The Man Who Reclaimed His Head, plays the part of a hack vaudeville mind-reader. When his faked act misses fire one night, he suddenly discovers that he has a real and appalling ability to see into the future. He correctly foretells one disaster and his fortune seems made. Except for one profitable Derby winner, further prophecies are all of death. His wife (Fay Wray) begins to think he is going mad and the public begins to think he is a menace. A solution, however, is handy. His clairvoyance possesses him only when he is in the presence of another woman (Jane Baxter), who serves as his "battery," charging him with psychic powers. When she retires from his life, he loses his uncomfortable knack of scooping the world on bad news.
Public Hero No. 1 (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). There is not much variation possible in the formula demanded by the current cycle of G-Men pictures. In this one, Scenarist Wells Root did about all he could by making the heroine (Jean Arthur) the sister of a crook rather than of a Federal detective, and by letting the audience mistake the G-Man hero for a criminal until his visit to his superior reveals that the jail break he engineered was really a trick to gain the confidence of the leader (Joseph Calleia) of the Purple Gang, who escaped at the same time. From that point on, the story follows the accepted G-Man course: a hunt, punctuated by machine-gun fire and climaxed by the villain's death, this time in a theatre. It even includes two other familiar episodes culled from the Dillinger saga, the siege in a roadhouse and plastic surgery for purposes of disguise. These details. however, for cinemaddicts who find the current school of underworld melodrama the most exciting furnished by the cinema in the past three years, will merely serve to emphasize the obvious fact that a picture written to a pattern can seem all the more alive, original and exciting if the writing is well done and the pattern sound.
Good shot: the death of the dipsomaniac physician (Lionel Barrymore), who attends members of the Purple Gang affected by occupational disorders, in the besieged roadhouse where, while his gangster colleagues are busy shooting from the windows, he stands morosely drinking at the bar.