The Perfect Specimen (Warner Bros.) experiments with the solemn hypothesis that a boy may be nurtured to-all-round perfection in a sort of social vacuum; but that when he is tested against assorted worldliness he will relapse into human frailty. Irish Cinemactor Errol Flynn, a godlike young man of limited acting ability, performs the title role, and in demonstrating his perfection is at one point required to take most of his clothes off.* In this picture he labors under the screen name of Gerald Beresford Wicks, who has been schooled in all the arts and sciences by a bossy grandmother (May Robson), to fit him for the Wicks fame & fortune. His planned life gets out of hand when Mona Carter (Joan Blondell) crashes her car through the Wickstead fence, discovers the perfect specimen testing a Newtonian theory by falling out of a tree. With very little urging, Gerald reacts like a perfectly normal and admirably coordinated human. He pursues Mona, impresses her by flattening a tough guy (Allen Jenkins), wins another bout at a truck drivers' picnic, goes to work as a mechanic, conducts a merry courtship while Grandma Wicks and the nation's police beat the bushes for him. Set-tos with such surrealities as mad Poet Killigrew Shawe (Hugh Herbert) and the truckmen give Gerald's education the final polish. He goes home, gives tyrannical Grandma Wicks a piece of his mind, decides that Mona knows best.
The Great Garrick (Warner Bros.). As different from the cinema's typical period romance as champagne from sack, Ernest Vajda's figmentary episode in the life of 18th Century Play Actor David Garrick fits the Hollywood gag into the elaborate frame of Georgian humor. Garrick, who played Macbeth in the uniform of a Hanoverian general, might have enjoyed this modernization. He probably would have chuckled at his 1937 impersonator, debonair, English Brian Aherne, stealing scenes from noted Scene-Stealer Edward Everett Horton, but would certainly have advised some rewriting in the interest of pace.
The Vajda story has Garrick invited to Paris to appear with the Comédie Française in 1750. Preceding him there flies the rumor that he is coming over to teach the Frenchmen how to act. The angered members of the French company prepare an extravagant hoax, take over an inn Garrick must stop at en route, man it with players from their troupe. Plan is to give Garrick an alarmingly warm welcome. Tipped off, Garrick and his man Tubby (E. E. Horton) affect serene indifference to the staged hubbub.
When a frightened young woman (Olivia de Havilland) arrives with a fluttery story about a wrecked coach, Garrick accepts her as part of the plot, grandly surrenders his rooms to her. While he feigns concern for her safety and distress during the continued ructions, he decides she is a very bad actress. Later he tells her so, then beats the French at their own game, by impersonating one of their members. When he reveals himself there are mutual apologies and gallant toasts all round; but the girl has fled. In Paris he looks for her backstage, discovers that, sure enough, she was no actress at all.