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Brief Moment (Columbia) exhibits the difficulties that attend the marriage of an intelligent night club hostess to a wealthy ne'er-do-well. Abby Fane (Carole Lombard) marries Roderick Deane (Gene Raymond) with a very clear idea of what his family's reaction will be. In the course of a prolonged honeymoon, she acquires culture, fashionable boredom, a suspicion that her husband is more stupid than she thought at first. He enjoys being sponged on by his friends, particularly approves of a languid professional punster named Harold Sigrift (Monroe Owsley). Abby badgers Roderick into going to work for his father's firm. When he retires, humiliated by his incompetence, she scandalizes his parents by leaving him and going to work herself, at her old job. Finally Roderick comes to her with a pay check he has earned. Abby decides that since she cannot love anyone else, she and Roderick might as well make the best of it together.
Considerably less evanescent than the play by Samuel N. Behrman in which, performing as Sigrift, Critic Alexander Woollcott scored a sedentary success, Brief Moment emerges in the cinema as a bright investigation of small problems, slick, chipper and reasonably entertaining. Most inevitable shot: Owsley, inveterate cad of the films, sneering at Abby across his cocktail glass.
Berkeley Square (Fox). Peter Standish, a young American living in a London house inherited from his British forbears, finds himself one afternoon in a situation dear to romantic playwrights: transported into the Past. In his drawing room he finds the Pettigrew family, comfortably sure that they are living in the 18th Century. It appears to them that he is an earlier Peter Standish, their Colonial cousin, back from the Revolution, engaged to marry Kate Pettigrew. It is a stormy day and the Pettigrews are a little astonished to find, when Peter Standish walks in, that his feet are dry.
Presently the Pettigrews have further cause for astonishment. Peter Standish uses words like "cockeyed," "cigaret," "tank." He sits to Sir Joshua Reynolds, praises as his masterpiece a portrait not yet completed. He bewilders the Duchess of Devonshire with epigrams from Oscar Wilde, offends her by the historical tone of his compliments. He is not interested in Kate Pettigrew. He loves her sister Helen but he knows, from old diaries, that Peter Standish married Kate and Helen died when she was very young. Faced by the wry problem of an emotion at once timeless and defeated, Peter Standish finally finds himself back in the 20th Century, but not entirely of it. He knows now why the epitaph on Helen Pettigrew's grave is cut so deep.