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The simplicity of the story, the fact that its elements have been used in the cinema a thousand times before, make it easy to overlook the fact that Cynara is a most unusual picture. This is not because it possesses the surface excellences—sensitive direction, by King Vidor, and more than competent acting—with which shrewd old Samuel Goldwyn quite often equips his productions. It is because Cynara presents, with sombre thoughtfulness, a situation which the cinema almost always handles blatantly ; and because the values which it involves, while not particularly subtle, are wholly unlike those which U. S. cinema audiences are usually called upon to comprehend. Good shot: Phyllis Barry—a clever young actress whom Producer Goldwyn admired last year when she was playing in a Hollywood musical comedy—in a theatre with Colman, laughing at Charlie Chaplin. The Devil Is Driving (Paramount) is another chapter in Paramount's current saga of crime & punishment, dealing with misbehavior in the garage and the nasty methods of automobile thieves. These thieves are not adept. When they steal a "classy closed job" they drive it so fast that even traffic policemen notice them; in trying to reach their base of operations, the Metropolitan Garage, they run down a small child (Dickie Moore) in a toy roadster. His father is the garage manager (James Gleason), his uncle is a chipper young mechanic (Edmund Lowe). The father gets killed in spectacular fashion for trying to avenge his son's mishap. Edmund Lowe, assisted by the chief automobile thief's warm-hearted mistress (Wynne Gibson), evens the score without too much difficulty.
The toy automobile belonging to Dickie Moore can be identified as a death car the instant it appears on the floor of Metropolitan Garage. This and other paraphernalia in The Devil Is Driving—an airshaft into which a sedan topples, a narrow two-way ramp full of blind corners—make it a peculiarly stagey exposé. The garage is an interesting and elaborate caution to curious motorists. In addition to its ramps and airshafts, it contains a mechanic stupider than most real ones (Guinn Williams), a speakeasy with onyx bar, a suite of offices in which a racketeer (Alan Dinehart) operates with the assistance of a dumb monster (George Rosener) and a paint shop in the attic where purloined vehicles can be made unrecognizable in three and one-quarter minutes. Fast Life (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is a flagrantly foolish little picture in which Sandy Norton (William Haines) wins a big speedboat race with his coy fiancee (Madge Evans) sitting beside him and a large crowd cheering, in Avalon Bay off Catalina Island, Calif. Sandy is a young inventor and ex-sailor who finances the installation of a special carburetor in his Miss Victory by boarding yachts and robbing their owners. It is giving away no secret to tell how the race turns out because by the time it happens you are likely to be waiting, not to see who wins, but to find out how obnoxious Haines can become in his characterization of Sandy.