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Constance, who returned to talkies after being in silent pictures before her second marriage (to Philip Plant), works for RKO at a reputed salary of $22,500 a week. She is noted, in the cinema, for 1) extraordinary ability to wear clothes, 2) a figure suitable for her forte, 3) a cultivated accent, 4) a habit of suffering pleasantly in luxurious surroundings. She has protruding shoulder blades, a becoming air of sophistication.
Joan, comparatively unseasoned, went to Hollywood two years ago, works for Fox at a reputed salary of $5,000 a week.
She is not yet identified with a particular kind of role. She has a small round face, an air of petulant but yielding naïveté.
Both are daughters of famed Actor Richard Bennett and Adrienne Morrison, onetime actress who now runs a children's theatre in Manhattan. Both are sisters-in-law of Crooner Morton Downey, who married their sister Barbara Bennett, who is older than Joan, younger than Constance. Both were schooled in Manhattan, finished in Paris, taught not to like acting. Both last week appeared in new pictures, as follows:
She Wanted a Millionaire (Fox) shows Joan Bennett in the kind of picture which Constance specialized in a year ago. She is beautifully dressed, but unhappily married to a jealous and lustful sadist (James Kirkwood) who keeps a pack of hounds for strange purposes. Earlier in the picture, which starts out by mocking such carnivals in light-hearted style, she has been declared winner of an Atlantic City Beauty Contest.
As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that it is an adaption of the Nixon-Nirdlinger romance, which last year ended in widely publicized murder on the Riviera. Least convincing crises of the story are those which most closely approximate the bizarre realities of its derivation. When Joan suggests a divorce, her sadist carries her toward his kennels, licking his chops in an unpleasant way. A murder has to be committed and when this has been attended to, by a slobbering retainer whom the sadist employs to be the target of his insults, Joan, fatigued with millionaires, seems likely to take up with a locomotive engineer (Spencer Tracy). She Wanted a Millionaire is handicapped by the timid sensationalism with which Hollywood is forced to treat sexual irregularity.