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(Paramount) would seem more strange if it were less similar to the strange cases of Madelon Claudet and Madame X. This time it is Wynne Gibson—a versatile actress hitherto given to gay or dipsomaniac impersonations—who marries a rogue (Pat O'Brien), goes to jail for his knaveries and emerges after 15 years hoping to find out what has become of her small daughter. She secures a job with a modiste and is assigned to alter a wedding dress. Cinemaddicts will not be surprised to learn that the dress is for the daughter (Frances Dee). The wages of virtue in the cinema are seldom high. In this case they touch a new low. The woman's husband reappears, tries to blackmail the daughter. Wynne Gibson is therefore compelled to shoot him. Having done so she faces the prospect of a lonely and miserable senescence. The best quality in The Strange Case of Clara Deane is a disarming unpretentiousness of writing and direction. Actresses who play unhappy mothers usually do it well. Wynne Gibson is inferior to Helen Hayes (Madelon Claudet) but better than Ruth Chatterton (Madame X). She is ably badgered by Mr. O'Brien and Dudley Digges, as a detective who adopts her child. Typical shot: Wynne Gibson being separated from her child by prison matrons.
Thunder Below (Paramount). As the wife of a Central American geologist (Charles Bickford) who learns that he is going blind, Tallulah Bankhead has very little to do in this picture except sit around and talk. But her talk is supposed to register emotional starvation and it does so. She makes you feel why she would like to run off with the geologist's best friend (Paul Lukas) and why, instead, she goes away with a young engineer. When Lukas brings her back to her husband, Miss Bankhead has to put life into a melodramatic conclusion. She throws herself off a balcony into the rocky surf, leaving her husband and his friend to make what they can of their relationship. Thunder Below is indubitably Tallulah Bankhead's best picture. She helped adapt it, from Thomas Rourke's novel, and she gives a performance in it which justifies her own contempt for her earlier and inferior productions.