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Picked out of a 5¢-&-10¢ store by a suave gentleman crook (William Powell), Fay Cheyney is willing to undertake stealing a pearl necklace from a Duchess until the ease with which she fits into the duchess' social circle makes her mission seem both humiliating and unnecessary. Lord Kelton (Frank Morgan), the richest peer in England, as well as young Lord Billing have proposed to her on the evening when, out of well-bred loyalty to her accomplices, she cracks the duchess' safe. When Lord Billing surprises her in the act of handing over her booty to her partner, Fay Cheyney rings the burglar alarm herself. The chance that her hostess will allow her to go to jail is removed next morning when Lord Kelton reveals that, in his anxiety to warn an innocent young girl about the people she will meet in polite society, he has written Fay an outspoken letter about the other guests at the duchess' house party. Fay's gesture of tearing up the letter instead of using it for blackmail sharpens Author Lonsdale's point of showing that the British aristocracy could take lessons in morals from a sneak-thief. Good shot: William Powell—who hates sentiment and usually refuses to give it histrionic expression—saying farewell to Joan Crawford with tears in his eyes and a catch in his voice, both caused by the fact that he had a bad case of laryngitis when the scene was shot.
When You're in Love (Columbia). The ingenuity with which Hollywood scenarists arrange opportunities for the heroines of musical comedies to perform their function of singing is matched only by the lack of ingenuity with which they observe the tradition that all musical comedy heroines must be singers by profession. Now Grace Moore, as an Australian diva named Louise Fuller, yodels a Jerome Kern-Dorothy Fields song called The Whistling Boy when a crowd of urchins follows her into a rehearsal hall. When her husband (Gary Grant), whom she has acquired as a convenient way of complying with U. S. immigration quota laws, is trying to persuade her to stop regarding their union as a marriage of convenience, it is the cue for her to render something called Our Song in a forest whose birds stop twittering to listen. At her husband's country lodge, complying with the new convention whereby Metropolitan Opera stars show cinema patrons how jolly and unpretentious they really are by breaking into jazz, Miss Moore rivals the recent efforts of Lily Pons and Gladys Swarthout by moaning an expurgated version of "Minnie the Moocher" while attired in a flannel shirt and trousers. This is the comic climax of the picture. It is followed by the formal climax in which, at a song festival in which she is appearing as a gesture of loyalty to an orchestra conductor (Henry Stephenson). Miss Moore favors the sound track with Schubert's Serenade.
The picture marks the debut of Robert Riskin, long famed as the screenwriting teammate of Director Frank Capra, as a director as well as author. Following the pattern of It Happened One Night and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, in which Director Capra established Clark Gable and Gary Cooper as comedians, Director Riskin herein does the same thing for Gary Grant. Good shot: Miss Moore, who shows signs of becoming a skillful comedienne, proposing to Grant in a Mexican jail.