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Private Number (Twentieth Century-Fox) is that old stage play Common Clay, in which the beautiful young servant girl's love for the handsome collegiate son of her employers runs its course without benefit of clergy. The higher official moral standards of Hollywood bring Matrimony to Ellen (Loretta Young) and Dick (Robert Taylor) quite early in their attachment. He is home for the summer, and she has only lately taken service under Wroxton (Basil Rathbone), a tyrannical butler who collects a personal assessment, sometimes amatory, from the employes he engages for the Winfields. Failing to collect from Ellen, Wroxton tells the Winfields she is in difficulties. Follows the historic line: "So I'm not good enough to be your son's wife. I'm only good enough to have his babe!"
In spite of its mystifying title and occasional turgidity, Private Number is more than a cliche in modern dress. Its interest does not lie in the love affair but in its exposition of the complicated backstairs politics of a big household. Wroxton's perpetual quarrel with the cook, his sly methods of bullying the chauffeur, his espionage operations with the downstairs maid, his scavenging the household's pay envelopes and extending his influence into the private lives of his employers are a competent addition to current institutional screen drama.
Palm Springs (Walter Wanger) is an attempt to commercialize the publicity which fan magazines and travel agencies have lavished on a colony of luxury hotels perched on the rim of an extinct volcano in the desert 125 miles from Los Angeles. The narrative concerns the efforts of Joan Smyth (Frances Langford) to snare a rich husband (David Xiven) in order to repay her father (Sir Guy Standing) for his sacrifices in earning a living as a gambler to provide her with the luxuries of a fashionable school. She ends by marrying Slim (Smith Ballew), owner of a dude ranch.
To avoid annoyance by gapers and because the air of Palm Springs is often dusty, none of the desert scenes were shot at the resort but at an unfashionable hamlet called Palmdale, twelve miles away. Palm Springs' exteriors were built on the Paramount lot. Among the highly agreeable music interlarding this inoffensive picture is The Hills of Old Wyoming, which Wyoming's delegates to both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions chose last week as their official song.