Strictly Dishonorable (Universal). Between the necessities of being naughty to please the audience and nice to please the censors, lies a great void. Into this void flop most of Hollywood's attempts to be sophisticated. Universal Pictures made a valiant try to sidestep the flopping process in this production by sidestepping sophistication. When Preston Sturges wrote the play he invented a heroine who spent a good deal of time during the story trying to be seduced, but the movies, true to their glorious traditions of U. S. womanhood, calmly purified her.
The narrative fades in with the young person enroute to a Manhattan speakeasy with her fiance. Drinking therein are an Italian tenor and a courtly ex-judge. Before many reels have elapsed the fiance gets himself jailed for badgering a cop and the young person finds herself in the tenor's rooms for the night. So childlike and pure is she that he puts her to bed with a huge teddy bear and goes to sleep on the sofa. He surprises her and probably himself the next morning by proposing marriage. Since she has fallen drip-pingly in love with him the only obstacle to be disposed of is the fiance who arrives hotfoot from jail. They send him out to wait in a taxi and forget all about him.
The loudest laughs went, as they did in the play, to the Irish policeman, ably acted by Sidney Toler. Messrs. Paul Lukas and Lewis Stone were the tenor and the judge with their usual suave excellence. Mr. Lukas did not sing. Sidney Fox played the young woman and would have been very good indeed if she had not been so cutey-cute. Characteristic shot: Miss Fox lying on the bed thrashing arms & legs and wailing, "I'm not a baby!"
Once a Lady (Paramount). While her son is reaching his majority in The Sin of Madelon Claude t, Helen Hayes changes from a blooming peasant girl into a shrunken harridan, withered and stringy with age (TIME, Nov. 9). In Once a Lady, Ruth Chatterton survives the years which it takes her daughter to grow up without developing a single wrinkle. Both heroines pass the intervening period in more or less persistent prostitution. The fact that dissipation has a less damaging effect upon Ruth Chatterton may be regarded as a tribute to the durability of the First Lady of the Cinema. The picture is a tribute to her in no other respect.
The plot is in the same pattern as Madame X and Madelon Claudet. Prom- ising an estranged husband (Geoffrey Kerr) to support a fortuitous rumor that she is dead. Miss Chatterton disappears into the Parisian demimonde. Years later she threatens to reveal that she is still alive and resentful when he refuses to let their grown-up daughter marry. Cinemas in which the climax arrives only with the maturity of the heroine's offspring are likely to be long drawn out. This one, though Ruth Chatterton acts well and ably affects a Russian accent, seems as long as two ordinary cinemas and twice as ordinary.
RKO & Selznick