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I Live My Life (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). The taming effect which love for a son of toil can have upon a daughter of the rich has been photographed before but never with the sparkle that this has. They meet in a ditch on the island of Naxos where Brian Aherne has been probing for statues and Joan Crawford, ashore from her father's yacht, for adventure. The story gathers momentum with the progress of their acquaintance through a flirtation, which ends in her giving him a bogus name, and a second meeting in New York, toward her repentance and, eventually, Love. This time it does not end here but proceeds to satisfy the logic of its light-mannered premises. Miss Crawford's moral bankruptcy is liquidated to a point at which she is ready to give up the love that salvaged her in order to keep her father (Frank Morgan) from less figurative pauperism. Ineffective, charming Morgan stops her sacrifice; the last barrier to union with Archeologist Aherne is gone, so far as she is concerned, but he sustains his course of discipline until her addictions to finance, snobbery and fancy dress are overcome and she is ready to go back to Naxos for further statuedigging.
O'Shaughnessy's Boy (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) introduces a new and slightly Freudian note into the father & son relationship which Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper capitalized so successfully in The Champ. This time the moist elephantine fondness of a circus animal trainer for his cry-baby offspring is complicated by the circumstance that the son has been encouraged, by a spinster aunt (Sarah Haden), to hold his father responsible for the death of his mother and, in consequence, to detest him bitterly. The climax of the picture comes when a court awards Windy O'Shaughnessy (Beery) provisional custody of his son and Windy, broken down by years of sorrow that preceded the reunion, succeeds, by overcoming his son's hatred, in regaining the self-confidence that enables him to make an elephant walk through a hoop of flame with a tiger in its howdah.
In the years since The Champ, Jackie Cooper has grown big enough to need a substitute (Spanky McFarland) in scenes showing him as an infant but neither this nor the element of filial antagonism introduced by O'Shaughnessy's Boy really alters the essential pattern. Throughout the picture, Beery sweats, Cooper weeps and susceptible audiences are likely to enjoy themselves enormously.