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Reckless (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Mona Leslie (Jean Harlow) is a torch-singer. "I waste no weeping on lost romances," she growls, "I pay my losses and take new chances." The first chance she takes is a marriage to a young moneybags (Franchot Tone) whose remorse, the day after this casual ceremony, is such as to make him eye his morning pick-up as if it were poison. The marriage ends when, in a fit of alcoholic miseries on the night of a large party, he shoots himself as ungallantly as possible, leaving Miss Leslie about to bear a baby whose paternity becomes the subject of a front-page law suit.
This enables Ned Riley (William Powell), a jolly sports promoter who once put Mona Leslie to sleep by proposing to her and has befriended her during her spectacular home life, to slip a ring on her finger when she is a widow making her stage comeback with a song called "Hear What My Heart Is Saying."
What purpose all this may serve, beyond reminding cinemaddicts of the Reynolds-Holman case three years ago, it is hard to say. As entertainment, its principal virtue is the way in which it disguises the fact that, since she can neither sing nor dance, Jean Harlow is less than the ideal heroine for a musical comedy, by effective concentration on her more fundamental talents, gowned by Adrian.
Cardinal Richelieu (Twentieth Century) can be identified, in the gallery of George Arliss' portraits of historical celebrities, as the one in which he practices a downright deception. In order to foil plotters who requested his ward's husband to murder him, Richelieu quickly persuades this open-minded young man to change sides and to tell the Duc de Baradas that he has done his ugly chore instead of really doing it. A moment of some tension arrives when Baradas inspects Arliss lying on a sofa with his eyes shut, wonders whether to stick a sword into him. When, for no valid reason, Baradas decides not to, the tension is over and Cardinal Richelieu spryly sets off about his business of bamboozling Queen Mother Marie into handing over an incriminating treaty, identifying for fat Louis XIII the plotters against his throne and personally defeating an amalgamation of enemies which seems to comprise at least half the character actors in Hollywood.
Released with as much fanfare as Les Miserables (see p. 52), Cardinal Richelieu is still almost as exciting as when Bulwer-Lytton first gave it to the world a hundred years ago. That Richelieu allows himself to become party to a lie does not mean that in other particulars George Arliss' performance differs materially from the ones he has given already as Rothschild, Alexander Hamilton, Disraeli and the Duke of Wellington. Francis Lister's ugly portrait of the king's younger brother Gaston is probably the best acting in the picture. Exciting shot: Arliss stopping his horse without saying "whoa."