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going back to work. She does not find time to be mystified by
discovering that even true love for her is merely one more publicity
stunt. She is nestling nervously in HanIon's arms when the picture
ends. Bombshell is, besides acid farce and firecracker satire,
something like an inspired lunatic's self-diagnosis. Lola is not really
Jean Harlow, not even the Harlow of un-happy gossip, but she is enough
like her impersonator to make it hard sometimes to see where reality
ends and the impersonation starts. Director Victor Fleming and his
adaptors, John Lee Mahin and Jules Furthman, must have enjoyed putting
the final gloss of ambiguity on this picture, with touches like a
squabble on a set for Jean Harlow's Red Dust; mention of a letter to
"our casting director Ben Veranda" when MGM's real casting
director is Ben Piazza; an advertisement for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's
"star power" in the one truly sad line in Bombshell, Lola's
gulping epitaph for her grand passion: "Not even Norma Shearer or
Helen Hayes, in their nicest pictures, were ever spoken to like
that." The Way to Love (Paramount). The story of this picture is
the story really of all Maurice Chevalier musicomedies. It starts with
a burst of song integrated with action, building up to a shot of
Chevalier in straw hat and dilapidated clothes, grinning and singing.
There follows the scene in the eccentric little shop, this time a shop
for dispensing aid of all kinds to harassed lovers; the difficult
evasion of the shopkeeper's country niece who has a large dowry; the
romance, beset with difficulties, with a waif of the Paris streets
(Ann Dvorak). What makes The Way to Love different from most Chevalier
pictures is a quality of light poetic humor in the writing. The
great, the consuming ambition of Chevalier in this picture is to be a
guide to Paris. He is first shown listening with intense disgust to an
ordinary guide's harangue on the steps of Notre Dame, then explaining,
with music and gestures, how the job should have been done. You share
his distress at hearing a hack perform a job which for him would have
been an avocation. The minor characters in The Way to Love are imagined
with perverse and delicate wit. M. Bibi (Edward Everett Horton),
Chevalier's employer, is a severe, nervous, gay old gentleman who, when
he has quarreled with his wife, invents with Chevalier a game of
checkers played with liqueur glasses, then develops a passion for
chopping off neckties. Even more extraordinary is Mme Bibi's niece. She
is a country wench so neurotic about marriage that merely to pronounce
the word causes her to claw the face of the speaker with nervous
hootings. Chevalier makes love to his Madeleine while her profile is
being dangerously sketched by her guardian, a professional knife
thrower. Ever in My Heart (Warner). The fact that Barbara Stanwyck is
an emotional actress of considerable skill causes her employers to
select for her sad stories of the death of babies and similar sentimental
hashish. Ever in My Heart is the old one about the girl who
married a German professor just before the War. Their baby dies early
in the picture but the real punch comes, as you might expect, when Mary
Wilbrandt (Miss Stanwyck) meets her Hugo (Otto Kruger) in France, when
she is a U. S. canteen worker and he is a German spy. Good sequence: a
troupe of street boys planning to stone the
