Queen of the Night Clubs (Warner). Although Broadway night clubs have served as a locale for more pictures than any other background except the western plains, there has not been one yet in which the patrons neglected to throw confetti or paper streamers, or to rise and cheer when the hostess, with a roll of drums, tripped in. Even now when Texas Guinan, perched on a chair-back with her suckers around her, invokes an atmosphere indisputably authentic, the public is not allowed to forget that her grown son, whom she has not seen for years, will presently turn up and be accused, at the moment he is recognized by her, of a murder committed by someone else. Feeble directing of these elements is compensated chiefly by the beautiful legs of Lila Lee as a night club entertainer. Best shot: Texas Guinan asking for a hand.
Mary Louise Guinan ran away from Denver in 1904 with a reporter whom she married and later left to join a musical show. Remarkable for the resonance of her voice after midnight, she became famous after 20 years in vaudeville, stock, and westerns, as hostess of her own Manhattan night-club—the El Fay. An El Fay waiter sold a bottle to a customer with a badge and the club was given a padlock and a front-page story. In a new club Hostess Guinan continued to greet her friends with "Hello, Johnny" and her paying clients with "Hello, sucker."; Keeping her ebullience corsetable with a diet of broccoli and orange juice, she shouts "Pull up your water wings" whenever somebody upsets a bottle and "Give this little girl a hand" when her well disciplined revue girls perform. Recurring padlocks merely furnished publicity for the launching of new Guinan clubs. The current one is the Texas Guinan's Club Intime in 54th Street. Amiable, witty, sentimental, blonde, mercenary, she keeps her age a secret, crosses herself when she sees a policeman, has millionaires thrown out of her club if they get rowdy, lives quietly with her mother in Greenwich Village.
Geraldine (Pathe). Booth Tarkington, amiable observer of smalltown surfaces, thought and wrote about a homely girl whose father brought home a bright young man to make her happy. The producers and players (Albert Gran, Marion Nixon, Eddie Quillan) got the drift of the thing, but not the kindly, Tarkingtonian sparkle. The result is only fairish.
Sonny Boy (Warner). Cast as the title of a theme-song, young Davey Lee created in The Singing Fool a demand for a picture in which he would be starred. Few critics dared to suppose that the vehicle would be more than a sentimental nimbus around the small Lee smile. They found instead an amusing and at times witty farce involving the efforts of a mother to keep a husband, from whom she is separated, from stealing his son. Lee (4 in May) is younger and funnier than Jackie Coogan was when he made The Kid with Charles Chaplin. Best shot: Sonny Boy in the clothes-hamper.