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Lady with a Past (RKO). Like her small sister in She Wanted a Millionaire, Constance Bennett in this picture is an American girl who has adventures in France. She, too, is seen wearing fine feathers and patronizing Parisian cafes while trying to straighten out her romantic uncertainties, but in other respects the pictures are dissimilar. Constance, far from being the finalist in a beauty contest, is a girl of high degree who has found that the men she admires are unsusceptible to her charms. To make herself more desirable, she sets out to acquire a past, aided by a flip gigolo (Ben Lyon) and an elderly fortune hunter (Albert Conti), who commits suicide when she declines his offer of marriage. Returned to the U. S., she finds that her subterfuges, though a shade more extreme than she had intended them to be, have answered their purpose. A bleak young man of fashion (David Manners) rebukes her at a dance and follows her eagerly into the street when she leaves, as she had hoped he would. Good shot: Constance Bennett falling fast asleep in a café and dreaming that her gigolo has become overenthusiastic about his duties.
Lovers Courageous (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), although it was written as a cinema, not as a stage play, by famed Playwright Frederick Lonsdale, has most of the qualities which are noticeable in adaptations of stage comedies. Its unusual charm springs partly from Lonsdale's gracious dialog and partly from the fact that the cast is about the best that Hollywood could assemble for this type of production. Reginald Owen is a sporting Earl, absurdly preoccupied with the nonsensical problems of barnyard and hunting field. Frederick Kerr is a superannuated British admiral, grunting pungent insults at the members of his family. Roland Young is a self-satisfied naval officer who has a fussy curiosity about the domestic affairs of his friends. It is characters like these—minor personages, sketched with a caricaturist's regard for mannerism and eccentricity—that really make Lonsdale's plays amusing, but he usually manages to think up a fairly entertaining story to go with them. This time it is about a scapegrace adventurer (Robert Montgomery) and the admiral's daughter (Madge Evans), whom he marries after meeting her in the store where he is a tobacco salesman. To arrange a felicitous denouement, Lonsdale has his hero write a play which, if it is anything like Lovers Courageous, is skilful, insignificant, likeable. Good shot: Montgomery and Evans eating their dinner—a steak, which Montgomery particularly enjoys because he thinks he has successfully concealed the fact that it was stolen.