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Danger—Love at Work (Twentieth Century-Fox). Junior Pemberton (Bennie Bartlett) had at ten the condescension of a fellow who was ready to enter Harvard. Uncle Alan (Walter Catlett) collected stamps. Brother Herbert (John Carradine) called himself a postsurrealist; he painted sublimations in bathrooms, on bay windows, hired a man to douse him with water when working on a marine subject. Mother Pemberton (Mary Boland) was notable for an insane kind of poise which she maintained even when the cook got drunk and had to be locked in the mop closet, or the downstairs maid tried to touch the family for three dollars to pay her bookmaker. Papa Pemberton (Etienne Girardot) might have received the Nobel Prize for breaking down the atom if Junior had not objected that the award would overshadow his fame as a child prodigy.
Only one of the Pembertons, Toni (Ann Sothern), was half sane. She helped poor Henry MacMorrow (Jack . Haley), the lawyer who was trying to get her family's signatures to documents enabling him to sell a piece of land they owned. Uncle Goliath (Maurice Cass) was the hardest one to persuade. To prove that civilization was a failure, he was living, dressed in bearskins, in a cave adjacent to his 40-room house. By the time Goliath signed the power of attorney on a piece of hide, Toni and Henry were in love. Toni knew that her family would never speak to her again unless she was married in church — so she and Henry went to a justice of the peace.
Amiably following the established for mula for stories about crazy families, Danger — Love at Work is unpretentious, well-paced and often very funny. Typical scene: Papa Pemberton trying to pick out the proper type of shotgun for use at a fashionable wedding.
Dr. Syn (Gaumont-British). To millions for whom the cinema is history's picture book, great figures like Alexander Hamilton, Disraeli, Voltaire, Rothschild. Richelieu et al. share one marked characteristic—an extraordinary resemblance to Actor George Arliss. Once even God looked something like him (The Man Who Played God). But whatever else he is supposed to represent, Actor Arliss is always his own suave self. He was never more so than in Dr. Syn. In the dual roles of an 18th century pirate and the kindly vicar of Dymchurch-under-the-wall, 69-year-old Actor Arliss takes a well-deserved vacation from high matters, enjoys a revel in unmonocled duplicity. To the simple folk of Dymchurchhe is an example in godliness; to his pirate crew, an iron leader; to His Majesty's revenuers, a headache— all of which added together make a picture to appeal to those who in an earlier era adored Robert Louis Stevenson.
Precise, neat Actor Arliss was Mrs. Patrick Campbell's leading man in 1901, has since assumed well-bred heroic proportions in the cinema. His next role may be a screen portrait of the late John D. Rockefeller. His well-wishers, meanwhile, are urging a fitting cinememorial, The Life of George Arliss, with Mr. Paul Muni.