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No Other Woman certainly cannot be considered one of the year's most propitious pictures but it is a creditable effort on the part of the company which, in the throes of panting reorganization over a year ago, has since made steps toward recovery. A month ago it appeared that RKO was headed for further reorganization when Production Chief David Oliver Selznick tendered his resignation (TIME, Dec. 26). By last week, Mr. Selznick and RKO's President Benjamin Bertram Kahane were ironing out their difficulties with an agreement which is understood to provide Selznick with a salary of $4,000 a week, and stipulates that he be in complete charge of some 20 RKO productions for 1933, with 20 or so more to be manufactured in accordance with the Selznick "unit plan."
Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing (First National) is a dramatization of a book with the same title in which Warden Lewis E. Lawes of Sing Sing related memoirs and stated theories of prison management. It is hard to believe that Warden Lawes would have committed the indiscretion with which the warden in this picture creates its central situation: allowing a prisoner a holiday from Sing Sing with nothing but the prisoner's promise to guarantee his return. The prisoner (Spencer Tracy) visits his girl (Bette Davis). During his call, she shoots and kills an admirer who has been trying to seduce her. The prisoner is plausibly though unjustly convicted of the murder, sentenced to death.
What makes Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing interesting if not sensational are scenes within the gates of Sing Sing. These will serve to convince cinema audiences that New York jails are far more comfortable places than the Georgia chain gangs which were made horrible in Laughter in Hell and I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang. In Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing the inmates are allowed to play handball and ask their keepers for cigars. The warden is a humane and clever autocrat who never approaches severity more closely than when he orders an overconfident criminal to pick up a match which he has thrown on the floor.