Man About Town (Fox) is shoddy melodrama, with modernistic underacting, about Washington embassies and the U. S. Secret Service. Warner Baxter, a Wartime Secret Service man, has become a gambling big-shot. He meets his best friend's (Conway Tearle's) fiancee (Karen Morley) and at once reforms, returns to the Secret Service. Karen Morley, a woman of action, becomes engaged to Warner Baxter. Conway Tearle is vexed. There is much keen, clipped talk, people being candidly selfish, sinister, caddish with pleased expressions. Back in the Secret Service, Baxter captures a killer-counterfeiter to get his hand in, then investigates his fiancee's murder of an international spy, her brother-in-law. He tries to save her from the consequences by recovering the gun from an umbrella stand at midnight. He gets shot, almost dies. His faithful butler reels, almost faints when he hears the news. To please a friend, Baxter's superior destroys the evidence against Karen Morley. Man-of-Action Baxter can now marry Woman-of-Action Morley.
The melodramatics are 19th Century with the difference that they are always faked for the effect on the other characters, who look at the ground most of the time, except when they look up to "drill" one another or to look fleetingly in one another's eyes and swear undying devotion in a casual voice. Typical lines: ''Aren't you getting a little hysterical?" "I know this whole sordid nightmare." "I won't stand this treachery." "Now you're getting sentimental." "He said, 'Don't be silly,' so I shot him." All the characters light cigarets at critical moments.
Night World (Universal) is a neat, legible carbon-copy of several other night club pictures. The night club's patrons, entertainers, chorus girls, doorman, policeman, gangsters, gamblers all get into the picture because they are all in the night club. Director Hobart Henley can thus change the subject whenever one set of characters begins to get dull, as in Vicki Baum's kaleidoscopic Grand Hotel. Mae Clarke is a square-shooting chorus girl who talks like a Girl Scout. She pities a young patron (Lew Ayres) who is the scion of a famed murder case and drinks to forget. Young love burgeons while gyp and doublecross are rampant all around, practiced by the proprietor (Boris Kar-loff), his wife (Dorothy Revier), her lover, the guests and Lew Ayres's mother (Hedda Hopper). Besides the burgeoning juveniles, only an honest policeman (Robert Emmett O'Connor) and a ratiocinative Negro doorman stay sweet & simple. While Ayres & Clarke prattle innocently about emigrating to the island of Bali in the South Pacific, gangsters wipe out the proprietor & his wife. The honest policeman kills the gangsters. Typical hardboiled shot: Mae Clarke telling the proprietor's wife who has offered to hold Lew Ayres's money until he sobers up: "Thanks, but I haven't time to count it." Typical emotional shot: Lew Ayres telling his mother, "You've just been a beautiful stranger to me. Did we ever have one hour together as mother and son?" Good shots: kaleidoscopic scenes of Manhattan nightlife.