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His Brother's Wife (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) does not present the kind of people sheltered audiences are used to seeing on the screen. Strong emotion makes both Chris (Robert Taylor) and Rita (Barbara Stanwyck) very caddish. She marries Tom, Chris's brother, to get even with Chris for leaving her to go on a scientific expedition in a prurient jungle. He retaliates by taking her to the jungle after he has gone home on furlough, just so he can tell her he despises her. This trick, though mean, does not impair her love. She inoculates herself with the virus of "spotted fever" to keep him from doing it, and is cured, after some agonizing symptoms, by a serum he has discovered.
Major embellishment of these proceedings is the co-starring of Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck, long co-starred romantically in fan magazines and chatter columns. Proximity in His Brother's Wife stimulates what is possibly the best performance of each to date, in spite of moments when John Meehan and Leon Gordon's screen play buckles under heavy alternating loads of whimsy and melodrama.
My American Wife (Paramount) is a pungent satire on the old theme of Europeanism v. Americanism, to which has been added a new twist. Many a plot has centred on the crusty U. S. capitalist who cleverly saves his daughter from an impoverished, scheming European nobleman. My American Wife presents the antipodal spectacle of a crusty U. S. capitalist saving an impoverished European nobleman from his scheming granddaughter.
Granddaughter is Mary Cantillon (Ann Sothern), whose head has been turned by the prattle of her socially ambitious mother (Billie Burke). When Mary returns from Europe to Smelter City, Ariz., with a titled husband, Count Ferdinand von und zu Reidenach (Francis Lederer), all the Cantillons but one are delighted. The one is Grandfather —Lafe (Frea Stone), a rugged individualist who founded Smelter City. "What in the Sam Hill does 'von und zu' mean?" demands the old man. Told it means "of and at," he snorts: "I'll be of and at my ranch as long as Mr. von und, zu is around."
When handsome "Ferdie" demonstrates that he hates being paraded at receptions and pigeonholed in a sinecure at the Cantillon Bank, wants only to go to real work, old Lafe changes his mind. With the guile at which old men are traditionally masters, Lafe succeeds in solving the domestic problem of a European who "wants to become an American" married to an American who "wants to become a European."
*Longest picture on record is The Great Ziegfeld (3 hr.)