Biography of a Bachelor Girl (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Ann Harding does not suffer in this one. Instead, still copiously exuding sweetness, she is cast as an adventuress so notorious that reporters storm her cabin when she returns to the U. S., so impoverished that bailiffs immediately thereafter denude her studio of furniture, so dashing that Robert Montgomery, editor of a magazine called Every Week, is ready to pay $20,000 for her biography. Ghostwriting her memoirs, he endangers the career of Edward Everett Horton, candidate for the Senate. Horton will lose the election if Every Week reveals the part he played in Miss Harding's early life. Montgomery and Harding go to a mountain cabin to finish the biography; Horton follows them; so does Una Merkel, the latter's fiancée. By this time Montgomery and Harding are in love and the issue between them seems to be whether he is willing to give up his career for her.
Part of the trouble with Biography of a Bachelor Girl is that there is a great deal too much talk and part is Miss Harding's womanly but determined bludgeoning of the role Ina Claire gaily aired on the Manhattan stage. Montgomery succeeds most of the time in keeping his celebrated winsomeness under control. When at literary work he wears a pair of horn-rimmed glasses with a Harold-Lloydish air. Funniest scene: Horton explaining why he cannot make an honest woman of Ann Harding.
Evergreen (Gaumont-British) is an adaptation of the Benn W. Levy musicomedy which charmed London audiences four years ago. It effectively introduces to U. S. cinemaddicts Jessie Matthews, a personable young actress who helped make that stage production so successful. Evergreen's general excellence in almost all departments shows that British cinemanufacturers can rival Hollywood quite as successfully in musical films as they have, during the past year, in every other field.
Conforming to Hollywood standards in settings, songs (mostly by Rodgers & Hart), dances and costumes. Evergreen even has a backstage plot. It shows its heroine, the ambitious daughter of a retired stage favorite, becoming a star by pretending to be her mother. The impersonation, carried on to the detriment of her own intrigue with a young press agent and to the feverish anxiety of her stage manager (Sonnie Hale), ends when, on a gala opening night, she removes her white wig and does a modern dance routine which first alarms, then enchants her audience.
The Rodgers & Hart melodies ("When You've Got a Little Springtime In Your Heart," "Over My Shoulder Goes Care," "Dancing on the Ceiling") sound infinitely better than their titles. Miss Matthews sings and dances to them as gracefully as they deserve. The only really weak spots in Evergreen are its happily infrequent efforts to be comic. Sample: The heroine to her scapegrace father: "Do you mind if I open the window?" His reply: "No, but don't give me the air."