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The Spider (Fox). A man sitting in the audience of a vaudeville theatre is murdered. The performers in the theatre, a pair of magicians, are suspected of the crime and members of the audience are implicated. One of the magicians uses black magic and sleight-of-hand to find the real culprit. When The Spider was produced on the Manhattan stage four years ago, a fair proportion of the characters in it were seated in the pit of the theatre in which it was produced; this method of staging mystery plays became so popular that for a few months the lobbies of Manhattan's theatres were infested with actors carrying concealed weapons and even the balconies resembled shooting galleries. In the cinema, obviously, no such presentation of The Spider was possible but it remains an exciting, gruesome and momentarily plausible dilemma, unfit for the hysterically inclined. In the cast, Edmund Lowe is the magician, Lois Moran the heroine, El Brendel a simple-minded spectator who provides comic relief by stealing a hat, asking stupid questions in a thick Swedish accent.
The Bargain (First National) is billed as a cinematic version of "Philip Barry's Prize Play." The award won by the play You and I on which The Bargain was based was but a minor trophy, from the Harvard "workshop" of Professor George Pierce Baker, in 1922. The Bargain sparkles intermittently with the witty insanity which is Author Barry's chief contribution to letters and the screen. But it is plainly the product of a sophomore playwright. Its major originality is to show a father who has enriched himself in business, painfully disappointed when his son offers to give up an artistic career and enter the family soap firm. The son's determination to enter business comes from lack of funds and a desire to marry, but the sacrifice of his esthetic ambition is made unnecessary when a picture painted by the father is judged bad enough to be used in an advertising campaign. Doris Kenyon and Lewis Stone perform ably as the middle-aged couple concerned, but whatever prizes accrue to the cinema should rightly be given to Funnyman Charles Butterworth. In the impersonation of a woebegone author, he states the story's theme: "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation." Later he makes soberly improper advances to a maidservant, meanders about at a fancy dress party in a Colonial costume and a wig which makes him look like George Arliss out of focus.
This Modern Age (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). In this picture Joan Crawford, now completely a blonde, has the role of a tipsy virgin, a wholesome inebriate who. although often disorderly in an innocent way herself, is appalled when she learns that her mother, a divorcee whom she is visiting in Paris, is being kept by a wealthy Frenchman. When her fiance tells her about it she calls him a liar, neglects to apologize when she learns it is true. Before long a horrid scene occurs. Disgusted at her mother's apparently inveterate immorality, the daughter takes up with a rounder who parades his bad intentions. Her fiance breaks into a room where they are reveling, pushes the rounder (Monroe Owsley) in his smirking weasel face, carries Joan Crawford downstairs.