(2 of 2)
Second Wife (RKO). This drama becomes pretentious because of the author's obvious attempts to give to a plot dictated by mechanics, the air of an original and unconventional commentary on life. Differently developed and directed, Second Wife might be all that it pretends to be. Its central situation—a conflict between old and new loyalties in the mind of a man who has married twice—is interesting and fairly new to the cinema, but its treatment is routine, its dialog a series of stock company quotations. A little concentration on the material itself could have made more credible the moment when Conrad Nagel, the widower who has married again, has to choose between staying with his second wife who is about to bear a child, or going to the sickbed of his child by the first marriage. In spite of her difficulties, Lila Lee acts competently in the title role. Best shot: a child's reactions to a posthumous birthday present from his dead mother.
When she was 4, Lila Lee appeared in a Gus Edwards show, School Days. At 12 she was taking character parts in cinemas. She was a star before she was 18—her face appeared in advertisements endorsing cold cream, soap, and underwear, and every day hundreds of people wrote to ask for her signature. Then she married and dropped out of pictures. She and her husband put all their money into a ranch in a rich country where it was said to be easy to grow citrus fruit. She had a child. The ranch failed. Lila Lee was penniless when, last year, Bryan Foy, Warner director, invited her to take a voice test. Like several actresses who had lost prestige in silent pictures, she did well for the sound device. Best of her old pictures was Male and Female, best of her new ones Drag.
Cameo Kirby (Fox). Booth Tarkington, who wrote this piece as a serious romance a long time ago, later satirized its genre in an even more successful story, Magnolia. On the screen Cameo Kirby is much funnier than Magnolia and in spite of such inescapably dull elements as J. Harold Murray's baritone repetitions of the theme song and the acting of the heroine, Norma Terris, who cannot act, its unintentional absurdities make it one of the most hilarious burlesques of Mississippi River fiction ever written. In one scene Miss Terris runs down the front steps of her pillared mansion, peers into a closed carriage, staggers, and moans, "He's daid"—an episode from which the audience is forced to infer that the person announcing the suicide of her father has chosen the method of throwing his body into a wagon and bringing it up to the house. Typical line: "Corey? Why, that's Kirby, Cameo Kirby, the man who slew and robbed your father, Miss Randall."