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Born to Love (RKO Pathe). In this one Constance Bennett suffers, loves, and suffers. In an emotional moment during the War she has a love affair with a U. S. captain. When she meets and marries a handsome English toff he passes the captain's baby off as his own, retaining custody of it after they are divorced. Miss Bennett suffers in marriage with him, suffers when separated from her child, suffers when she must live in poverty and not even see her old sweetheart for fear Sir Wilfred Drake (Paul Cavanaugh) will hear of it and continue his refusal to let her see the baby. But the most awful moment of suffering takes place when, permitted to see the baby for the first time in two years, she arrives at the house just after it has died. Paul Stein has put in some thoughtful directorial touches—the lovers talking in bed in a scene in which you see only the wall which they must see from the head of the bed; the Zeppelin raid on London with the sirens hooting and fast cars placarded TAKE COVER roaring through the streets; the scene— presented entirely in shadow silhouet, from the doorway of the room—in which Miss Bennett finds her baby dead. But as an emotional actress Constance Bennett is still merely a big-eyed young woman with a husky, well-schooled voice, who wears clothes nicely and is well-poised at all times. Best shot: a London cabby, hearing the sirens, solemnly jumping off the box and running into a cellar.
Doctors' Wives (Fox). There is a good idea in Doctors' Wives, some passable acting, and one splendid sequence in an operating theatre. There is in it also a good solid dose of dramatic hokum and Warner Baxter's eyebrow mustache, an adornment which does not seem to become an eminent surgeon. The idea is that doctors' wives are jealous of their husbands' time and suspicious of their chances for intimate propinquity to attractive women. For Joan Bennett, daughter of a doctor, and married to the doctor (Baxter) who was called to her father's deathbed, trouble begins on her wedding night when her bridegroom has to hurry out to a patient. After a scene in, which his faithlessness is apparently proven, she leaves him, runs to the arms of still another doctor. The scene in the operating theatre comes when Baxter, with his wife as one of the attendant nurses, operates on her lover. The situation is farfetched; not so the graphic hospital scenes.