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Theodora Goes Wild (Columbia). When the Lynnfield Literary Society met to ban a best-seller named Sinned Against, pretty Theodora Lynn (Irene Dunne) cast her vote with the rest. No one in Lynnfield knew that, under the nom de plume of Caroline Adams, she had written the book herself. Until its illustrator, Michael Grant (Melvyn Douglas), who had met Theodora on one of her rare trips to New York, arrived in Lynnnfield, there seemed no danger that her double life would be exposed. By good-humored blackmail, Grant compelled Theodora to persuade her maiden aunts to give him a job as gardener. Then he persuaded her to go berry-picking in trousers, fishing on Sunday morning and, in a final grand explosion of her inhibitions, to break with her aunts. In doing so Theodora also announced her love for him. At this point, Grant was quick to see that he had bitten off more than he could chew.
Grant's reason for following Theodora to Lynnfield was to show her that she was inhibited. Having followed Grant to New York, Theodora made it her business to show Grant that he was in the same predicament, only more so. She moved into his apartment, scandalized his family by behaving like an adventuress, contrived to become corespondent in not one divorce suit but two. By this time, Grant's repressions were as thoroughly shattered as her own and the secret of Caroline Adams identity had made red-ink headlines in the Lynnfield Bugle. When Theodora returned there, she found Grant and a brass band. For cinema patrons who like rollicking farce, Theodora Goes Wild amounts to a feast. It begins rollicking in Reel One, rollicks faster and more furiously from there on. Most rollicking shot: the wife of Theodora's publisher peeking out of her door to see her drunken husband and Theodora rollicking harmlessly on the floor.
Make Way for a Lady (RKO) is a resounding contribution to the Five Little Peppers school of cinema, showing what happens when a suburban high-school girl (Anne Shirley) undertakes to manage the sex life of her widowed father (Herbert Marshall). Convinced that he is in love with a lady novelist (Margot Grahame), she tries to wreck his romance with a schoolteacher (Gertrude Michael), does not quite succeed.
Implicit in the writing, acting and direction of Make Way for a Lady, a conviction that the picture is completely charming helps to obliterate any trace of charm which it might otherwise have possessed. Most tedious shot: Actress Shirley's simper.
Pennies from Heaven (Columbia) is a textbook example of the oldest adage in cinemaking: Nothing ruins a picture more effectively than too many good ideas. Best idea wasted is the character of Larry (Bing Crosby), a jailbird minstrel whose most prized possession is a 13th-Century lute, in an elaborate routine, involving a letter from a condemned man to Patsy Smith (Edith Fellowes), orphan of a murdered father. "Pennies from Heaven—the coins tossed down to him from tenement windows—are the currency with which Larry undertakes to support Patsy and her Grandpa (Donald Meek).