(3 of 3)
Only drawback to Bad Guy is that the sensational shots of man-made lightning snaking through the air in 40-ft. arcs are likely to inspire more respectful attention in a lay audience than Bruce Cabot's cheerful swagger.
Love Under Fire (20th Century-Fox) is an agreeable lot of nonsense adroitly arranged (for no good reason) against the j background of a Spanish revolution. Neither belligerent is identified and no political knuckles are rapped, so that Loyalist and Insurgent sympathizers alike may I leave their boos at home. The unpretentiously preposterous plot concerns the tribulations of a Scotland Yard operative, Tracy Egan (Don Ameche). who has fallen in love with Myra Cooper (Loretta Young), whom he met while liberating his repressions on a Continental holiday. Just as the guns begin to pop, Tracy gets a phone call from the Yard ordering him to bring in Miss Cooper, suspected of a jewel robbery. The local military party, whose uniforms resemble those of the Canadian Mounted Police, are also looking for a jewel thief—an English girl who visited a bank vault before the looting started, got away with the "Peralta diamonds." Further and frequently risible sequences: Lieutenant Chavez (Harold Huber) thrice presenting triumphantly to his general what he thinks are the missing diamonds, thrice consigned to a firing squad for his ineptitude; Borrah Minnevitch and his gang of lunatic harmonica players going musically crazy; the captain of a British freighter stopped and searched at sea, proclaiming his outraged feelings in lan guage as colorful and crossed-up as the Union Jack.
Make A Wish (RKO). Producer Sol Lesser, who guided the tiny footsteps of Jackie Coogan and Baby Peggy to their place among the infant stars, last week presented his present protege, Bobby Breen, in his third leading role. Nine-year-old Actor Breen (real name: Isidore Borsuk), whose Irish nomenclature imperfectly disguises him and whose shrill nasal singing tends to raise the hackles of the sensitive, is one of radio's gifts to the cinema. Basil Rathbone, who is forced by the exigencies of his role to regard this child with affection, was never cooler.
As different from the competent juveniles of Dead End (see p. 61) as rat biscuits are from tea biscuits, the tots of Make A Wish are discovered in a paradisal boys' camp, where Chip (Bobby Breen), although a new boy, becomes an instant favorite with everybody, apparently because of his bugle-like voice. Across the lake from the camp John Selden (Basil Rathbone) is summering, trying to get a start on his new operetta. Chip and Selden strike up a beautiful, laughing friendship, the operetta goes forward by leaps & bounds, and when Chip's mother, Irene (Marion Claire), comes for a visit and turns out to be a singer too, the end is clearly in sight. No amount of misunderstandings can do more than postpone the inevitable scene in which Rathbone, looking slightly ashamed of himself, comes into Irene's dressing room after the triumphant first night of his and her show, while Bobby Breen carols a sugary Oscar Straus tune (Make A Wish), at only three-quarters of his usual volume, outside the door.