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Jessie Matthews, currently the most popular young musicomedienne in London, is 27, tall, brunette and possessed of banjo-eyes and the best publicized legs in England. Her father was a tailor. Her brother, Billy, was a fisticuffer who claimed the lightweight championship of Europe. At 15 Jessie Matthews left school to become a chorus girl in the London edition of Irving Berlin's Music Box Revue, has since appeared mostly in Charles B. Cochran productions. She visited the U.S. in the chorus of two Chariot Revues, appeared in Earl Carroll's Vanities, starred in Wake Up and Dream. Her present husband is John Robert Hale-Monro ("Sonnie Hale"). They were married in 1931 after Sonnie Hale was divorced by Actress Evelyn Laye and Jessie Matthews was divorced by her first husband, Actor Henry Lytton Jr., following her voluntary testimony of her own adultery with Actor Hale. She likes riding, plays good tennis, dances three or four hours daily.
The Wandering Jew (Twickenham) presents the cavernous countenance of Conrad Veidt in four different makeups, representing four phases of the tedious life of that legendary Jew who made one of the worst guesses on record. In Jerusalem, Veidt is a rich Jew with a sick wife whom he asks Christ to heal. To his vexation the Messiah (off screen) suggests that he return the woman to the man from whom he stole her. As Christ goes to be crucified, the Jew curses and spits at Him. Condemned to wander the earth, Veidt next turns up during the Crusades. He jousts with one knight, attempts to seduce another's wife, is rebuffed. The Jew reappears as a Sicilian merchant whose son dies and whose wife leaves him to become a nun. Lastly, in Seville, he is a kindly doctor who treats a trollop's injured ankle, involuntarily saves her soul. When the Inquisition hales him up as a heretic, the Jew flays the Church for being unChristian, is condemned to burn. The facts that the flames do not harm him, that he dies spontaneously in a sudden glow of light, make it obvious that the Jew is redeemed.
The Night Is Young (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). This pallid operetta deals heavily with a princeling's love for a commoner. The Austrian emperor's nephew and heir (Ramon Novarro) is enamored of a big-eyed, winsome ballet dancer (Evelyn Laye), hired to cover his dalliance with a countess. Duty demands that he marry a princess and in the end he does so but not before he and the dancer spend an apparently comfortable night on top of a Ferris wheel.
Actors Laye and Novarro sing pleasant but unremarkable Sigmund Romberg-Oscar Hammerstein II songs, one of which begins: "There's a riot in Havana, a famine in Tibet, a quake in Yokohama. ..." The Night Is Young would probably be less dull if Edward Everett Horton and Charles Butterworth were given more elbowroom for their dependable buffooneries. Driving Miss Laye through the streets in a pouring rain, Butterworth sneezes, says, "Well, the suspense is over now—I know I'm catching cold."