The Case of the Curious Bride (Warner). Perry Mason (Warren William) belongs to the new school of cinema detectives. A lawyer by profession, an amateur chef by avocation, he investigates crime mainly for his own exhilaration. In The Case of the Curious Bride he is thrown into a state of high good humor when an old friend (Margaret Lindsay) pries him out of the kitchen to announce that her first husband, whom she thought dead, has reappeared, complicating her relations with her second, wastrel son of a millionaire. When he goes to call on the first husband and finds him murdered, Perry Mason's mood approaches hilarity. With his belligerent assistant Spudsy (Allen Jenkins) and his attractive secretary (Claire Dodd), he begins cracking jokes and upsetting the ethics of the legal profession. By the time his gaiety has started to subside, the murderer has been discovered, Perry Mason is about to embark for China.
The fashion for gumshoes who, when they encounter corpses, malefactors and degenerates, enjoy a manic period of which wisecracks are the symptoms, started with The Thin Man. The Case of the Curious Bride is a less adroit, less original picture but the speed of Michael Curtiz' direction manages to create somewhat the same mixture of tension and amusement. Warren William, fast becoming Hollywood's No.1 exponent of deductive reasoning, is aided enormously by Claire Dodd in her first cinema performance as a nice girl.
Claire Dodd has had a distrait career. Born in Iowa, she has lived in Arizona, Arkansas, Montana, California and New York. She wants to go to Europe but she cannot, since she has lost her birth certificate which she needs for her passport and does not know in what town she was born. In Los Angeles, she lives at El Royale Apartments facing the Wiltshire Golf Course. She does not play golf. Her major hobby is deep sea fishing. She has never caught a fish or even had a strike. She has few friends in the cinema industry. Most of the employes on the Warner lot, where her contract has another year to run, believe her husband is a millionaire connected with S. W. Straus & Co. ("44 Years Without a Loss to Any Investor"). W. Straus & Co. is in receivership. Claire Dodd's husband is actually Richard Straus, a Los Angeles realtor of moderate means. She likes large dogs and owns a Pomeranian. In her screen career, prior to The Case of the Curious Bride, she has always been cast as a siren. In private life, she teaches Sunday School once a week, dislikes siren roles. She is one of the best dressed, most personable actresses in Hollywood. She has no trouble dieting since she dislikes eating. She can drive her Packard but seldom does. Her next picture will be The Glass Key.
Traveling Saleslady (Warner) briskly relates the. adventures, commercial and romantic, of a young woman (Joan Blondell) who, to spite her father for not giving her a job in his tooth paste company, . goes on the road for his rival selling dentifrice with liquor flavors. Complicated principally by the necessity for outwitting her father's star salesman (William Gargan) while she falls in love with him, Angela Twitchell's career reaches its peak when, at a Chicago drug convention, she sees to it that her rival and fiance arrives late in a plane whose pilot she has hired to advertise cocktail tooth paste in skywriting.