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I Married a Doctor (Warner). When a modishly dressed young lady from Manhattan suggests to the citizens of the Midwest town to which she has just been brought by her new husband that they rebuild the place, including the drugstore in pseudo-Norman-French style, 1936 cinemaddicts will not necessarily feel that the idea is a spiritual and esthetic sunburst. Nor will they feel, when the town banker asks "Where is the money coming from? , that he is merely proving himself a worse dolt than the rest of the population by voicing for them an idea which nght-thinking people hold beneath consideration.
Changing what was once the greatest box-office title in the country, Main Street, or this second screen version of Sinclair Lewis' famed novel, was a simple task. Whether to bring the story up to date or treat it as a period piece must have been more difficult and Warner Brothers compromised by doing neither. The result, as acted by Josephine Hutchinson, Pat O'Brien and Ross Alexander, is consequently less to be recommended as entertainment than as an object lesson with the purport that time flies.
Absolute Quiet (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; consists of half a dozen well-worn melodramas tossed together, given a quick scramble, and dished up for the hungry half of double bills. Gerald Axton (Lionel Atwill), financier, sends his secretary's husband to Los Angeles so that he can transfer her to his ranch. At the ranch arrive Axton's castoff mistress, bound for Hollywood; her actor-lover; a Governor who has vetoed a bill Axton wanted passed—all in a plane in the process of cracking up. A pair of escaping criminals, also bivouacking at the ranch, refuse to let Axton light the flares on his private landing field. By the time the actor, driven mad by a facial disfigurement sustained in the plane crash, has killed the gunman and his moll, the secretary has decided that Axton is a despicable poltroon. Only good scene: the actor having hysterics.