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Wife v. Secretary (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is a grimly stereotyped investigation, without novel outcome, of the banal situation indicated by its title. Adapted by Norman Krasna, Alice Duer Miller and John Lee Mahin from a Faith Baldwin story, acted by Clark Gable, Myrna Loy (wife) and Jean Harlow (secretary), it is patently destined to be, for its producers, if not for their more civilized customers, one of the most profitable pictures of the year.
Desire (Paramount). There are two possible reasons why this picture was approved by the Hays organization. The first is that its agents were not sophisticated enough to understand it. The second is that U. S. cinema censors have suddenly become sufficiently enlightened to pass scenes showing a young couple misbehaving together when the picture which includes them has definite esthetic merit. Desire is a romantic comedy of grace, dexterity and charm in which Marlene Dietrich's performance is the best she has given since she became too dignified to exhibit the legs which brought her her first U. S. fame in the Bine Angel in 1930.
The picture opens in Paris, where Tom Bradley (Gary Cooper), a handsome young automobile engineer from Detroit, is setting out for a holiday in Spain. Madeleine de Beaupré (Marlene Dietrich) is also off for Spain. She is a de luxe jewel thief and in her handbag is secreted a pearl necklace worth 2,200,000 francs. Their paths cross along the road, where he fixes her car; again at the border, where she slips the pearls into his pocket to get past the customs inspectors; once more in Madrid, where she joins her oily confederate (John Halliday). When the three are sequestered together in an Andalusian mountain inn, the flirtation between Bradley and Madeleine suddenly ripens into something else, something which Director Frank Borzage contrives to convey in scenes which are at once gay, delicate and, in view of the cinema's attitude toward such matters since the Legion of Decency started to operate in 1934, sensationally explicit.
*Not to be confused with The Night Is Young, A Night at the Opera, Two for Tonight, Every Night at Eight, Let's Live Tonight, Night Life of the Gods, It Happened One Night, After Tonight, Be Mine Tonight, Out All Night, Night After Night.