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Hard to Get (Warner Bros.), like The Cowboy and the Lady, deals with romance between a poor but honest young working man (Dick Powell) and an opinionated but lovely young heiress (Olivia de Havilland) with a crotchety father (Charles Winninger). Product of the Hollywood minimum of five writers (Jerry Wald. Maurice Leo, Richard Macauley, Wally Klein, Joseph Schrank), it shows a few deviations from pattern which give it an unexpected and agreeable individuality. Sample: when the heiress (as in The Cowboy and the Lady) adopts the invariable ruse of impersonating her own maid, her father, instead of objecting, happily arranges for her to serve dinner.
Apparently intended chiefly as Actor Powell's parole from musical pictures, Hard to Get contains only two songs, for elaborate orchestration substitutes a use of acrophobia unsurpassed since Harold Lloyd's Safety Last. Good sequence: Arthur Housman, ablest rival to Robert Benchley in the cinematic portrayal of amiable intoxication, trying to stand up in a crowded subway car.
Also Showing Just Around the Corner (Twentieth Century-Fox). Shirley Temple. Bill Robinson, Franklin Pangborn and Charles Farrell in a gentle little comedy designed to explain the facts of the Depression to the youngest generation and to prove that for the cinema's No. i child actress, box-office oblivion is still far down the road.
Professor Mamlock (Lenfilm-Amkino).
Powerfully realistic investigation of the effects of Nazi Government upon a Jewish surgeon in Berlin.