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Front Page Woman (Warner). Ellen Garfield (Bette Davis), crack reporter of the Star, scoops her fiance Curt Devlin (George Brent), crack reporter of the Express, on the murder of a theatrical producer. Thereafter, the two engage in a good-humored but energetic rivalry. Curt Devlin first gets an advantage by identifying the mystery woman in the case from the perfume on the dead man's coat. Then Ellen Garfield catches up by finding the woman's whereabouts by means of a laundry mark. Finally their efforts to outwit each other lead to a sequence in which, before the jury has announced its verdict in the trial, the presiding judge is flabbergasted to find it prematurely bannered in both the Star and the Express, in headlines which flatly contradict each other.
There is nothing particularly original about Front Page Woman. Nonetheless, brightly written, eminently well played and directed for comedy values by Michael Curtiz, it is distinctly better than average entertainment. Good shot: Ellen Garfield trying to explain to her city editor that her flash on the outcome of the trial was incorrect.
Mad Love (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). This adaptation from Les Mains d'Orlac by Maurice Renard is one of the most completely horrible stories of the year. It presents Peter Lorre as a maniac surgeon who can do anything with a scalpel but nothing at all with Yvonne Orlac (Frances Drake), an actress who has no use for him because she loves her pianist husband, Stephen (Colin Clive). When Stephen's hands are mangled in a railroad wreck, Dr. Gogol (Lorre) replaces them with the hands of a murderer who has that day been guillotined. Thereafter the hands of Orlac give evidence that the transfer has done nothing to impair the knack for knife-throwing which was the obsession of their original owner.
Lorre, perfectly cast, uses the technique popularized by Charles Laughton of suggesting the most unspeakable obsessions by the roll of a protuberant eyeball, an almost feminine mildness of tone, an occasional quiver of thick lips set flat in his cretinous, ellipsoidal face. It is not conducive to sound sleep to watch him operating on little girls, shuddering with sadistic thrills at public executions, or slavering over the wax image of Mme Orlac which he keeps in his apartment. One of the best scenes in the picture is the maniacal matter-of-factness of Lorre's drunken housekeeper who, finding Mme Orlac at the front door, takes for granted that she is the wax image come to life, shoos her upstairs to the chamber where she is trapped by Lorre and, subsequently, rescued by the police and her vengeful husband. Even the music that bursts forth for the lovers' reunion has its chilling overtones, for nothing has been done about the hands of Orlac. They are still, as he clasps his wife to his breast, the hands of the guillotined knife-thrower.