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Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. So bland and calm was the satire of Author Anita Loos' famed opus, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, that, when translated into cinematic dialect, it seemed probable that only a faint echo of its hilarity would remain. Such is not the case. Ruth Taylor as the very arch criminal, Lorelei Lee, is so coy, and cogently appealing that it becomes easy to believe in her conquest first of the vulgar but munificent Mr. Eisman, then of the wan but even more wealthy Henry Spoffard. Dorothy Shaw, the hard-boiled bantam brunette who assists the capricious avarice of Lorelei, is neatly played by Alice White. It would have seemed not incredible had their jaunt to Paris, underwritten by Mr. Eisman to further the already astonishingly complete education of his two protegés, resulted in the complete rehabilitation of the French franc.
Culled from the grim pages of Author Loos's comedy, the subtitles have the brilliance and at least part of the durability of a diamond bracelet, which, as Lorelei Lee remarked in a wisecrack which has since been heard around the world, will last forever. Altogether, in its slyly sympathetic exposition of gold-digging as a fine art, the picture has precisely the delicious flavour of its literary model.
Wife Savers. Once more Wallace Beery and Raymond Hatton cavort foolishly together, this time in a small Alpine village. Its inhabitants, with the exception of one beautiful girl, find their presence highly disagreeable. Wallace Beery becomes an Alpine guide, a profession in which his efforts are ludicrously insufficient. As Now We're in the Air at one point descended to extraordinarily vulgar farce, so Wife Savers allows its plot to depend upon a somewhat ribald interpretation of a note, written by the heroine, in which she informs the hero that he will have to marry her because she is in trouble. Wallace Beery also confesses in a subtitle that he is not to blame for having been born a month too soon. Wife Savers, despite or perhaps on account of such careless coarseness, is quite consistently laughable.
The Divine Woman is another vehicle for the extraordinarily tempestuous passions of Actress Greta Garbo. She plays the part of Marianne, a little country girl who completely eclipses a courtesan mother by becoming the greatest actress in Paris. But even when bouquets, floral and financial, come raining down around her, she cannot forget Lucien, who, because he deserted his regiment to be near Marianne, has been put into prison.