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Given the power to work miracles, what are the best miracles to work? As the days go by, this problem becomes increasingly bothersome to Mr. Fotheringay. In the drygoods store where he clerks, it is easy enough for him to tidy up his department by ordering goods back onto the shelves. He can also furnish the prettiest girl in the shop with a diamond tiara and a costume like Cleopatra's, but investigation proves that his power falls short of making her fall in love with him. Mr. Fotheringay's employer wants him to use his ability to speed up retail deliveries. An idealistic curate suggests humanitarian schemes. Impatient with trifles, the miracle worker creates a gigantic palace, fills it with important people, dresses himself in the costume of a medieval king and announces that he wants the-world run better. When his audience is slow about obeying, he orders the earth to stop going around. The result of this command is so shocking to Mr. Fotheringay that it is all he can do to tell it to go on again. By this time, he is a little weary of omnipotence. His last miracle is to deprive himself of it, turn time back to where it was when the whole thing started.
In Producer Alexander Korda's new and fabulously well-appointed studio at Denham, England, two of the most valuable items of equipment are 70-year-old Author H. G. Wells (see p. 69), now fairly launched on a new career as a screenwriter, and a 43-year-old "special effects" expert named Ned Mann, whose ability to work miracles with fake backgrounds and trick shots is even more indispensable to this picture than it was to the former Wells-Korda opus, Things to Come. Wells, Mann and mousey Actor Roland Young, who is ideally suited to his role, make The Man Who Could Work Miracles an enormously engaging combination of farce, fantasy and philosophy. Good shot: A puffy retired colonel (Ralph Richardson) tasting a highball from which, as a favor to the curate, Mr. Fotheringay has miraculously removed the whiskey.
The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). "Sherry! Champagne would be ideal, but sherry will do." This airy comment by Lord Dilling (Robert Montgomery) as he unstops a decanter in the boudoir of Fay Cheyney (Joan Crawford) serves neatly to disguise his surprise at the discovery, made a moment before, that she is a burglar. It also serves as a compact description of the picture, adapted from Frederick Lonsdale's play which Ina Claire played on the stage in 1925 and Norma Shearer on the screen in 1929. In The Last of Mrs. Cheyney the action takes place in those British drawing rooms and country houses whose fabulous elegance has become as much a tradition of the modern theatre as its footlights. The acting required for this kind of comedy, as stylized and polished as that of Chinese tragedy, is not precisely the brand at which Montgomery, Crawford et al. are specialists. Nonetheless, if The Last of Mrs. Cheyney lacks the effervescence it had when Ina Claire played it on the stage, the screen play, by Leon Gordon, Samson Raphaelson and Monckton Hoffe, retains the pleasantly dry flavor of Author Lonsdale's wit. Smooth direction by the late Richard Boleslawski, who died just before shooting was completed, and lavish production by Lawrence Weingarten, MGM's heir apparent to the late Irving Thalberg, makes it one of the most refreshing comedies of the season.