(3 of 3)
The Middle Watch. It is still considered uproarious for a pretty girl to be found sneaking out of a man's room clad in carefully stitched stage chemise. This sort of revelation is constant in The Middle Watch, which seeks novelty by locating its bedrooms on a British warship. Two young ladies spend an innocent night aboard but endanger the status of their officer friends when an aged and moral Admiral arrives. This seadog (Fred Kerr) serves to lampoon Great Britain's glory on the high seas. Finding a sentry in his stocking feet, he exclaims: "This man's half naked!" A grumpy, lovable fellow, he endears himself to the cast and the audience. Most of the other players are English, have brought this comedy from a successful run in London and a few days in Washington, where Ishbel MacDonald (accompanied by Lady Isabella Howard, Edmond Howard, Miss Gytha Stourton, Michael Wright of the British Embassy and Thomas Archibald Stone of the Canadian Legation) laughed hard and often at its tried and trusty gaieties.
The Nut Farm is the kind of comedy which usually slides into Manhattan for the diversion of wan and heated summer residents. In the chill, perky atmosphere of autumn its hooligan obviousness gets only the least flattering applause. The Barton and Bent families move westward from Newark, N. J., to work a nut farm in California. There they succumb to the cinema virus and surrender some $30,000 of their savings to produce a family film. The result is disastrous until the smart young Barton son (Wallace Ford), by skillfully snipping out the dull sequences, converts their appalling drama into a burlesque. The humor throughout is on a par with the joke-buttons that small boys wear on their lapels.
Deep Channels. Critic J. Brooks Atkinson of the Times: "It was difficult to discover what the play was about. Candidly, it was impossible." Critic Robert Littell of the World: "After a few feeble efforts to convince ourselves that a play if bad enough can also be funny, we all relapsed into numbness and asphyxiation." Critic Percy Hammond of the Herald Tribune: "It is but a windy posture, meaning less than nothing. . . ." The plot involved a daughter of the haute monde who gave herself to a groom (thereby driving that young man's sweetheart to suicide) but wisely married a physician.