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Live, Love and Learn (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) sends Robert Montgomery forth from a whimsical, penniless life in Manhattan's Washington Square section into battle against the stultifying wiles of Mammon. He is armed with artistic genius that "has something ostentatiously quiet about it," a facility with yellows unequaled since van Gogh and a respectable capacity for liquor. Mammon showers him with gold, distracts him with a nasty number named Lily, wins him from his garret with commissions to paint a portrait of Mrs. Colfax-Baxter, a study in oils of Mr. Palmiston's Derby winner, Blue Bolt. When wife (Rosalind Russell) and crony (Robert Benchley) walk out on him, taking much of life's beauty and all of its humor back to Washington Square, Painter Montgomery hits the skids. Near bottom his eye lights on a ghetto lad selling flowers. He collars him, explains to the boy's dubious mother that he wants to paint the lad. Says she: ''What color?" From then on Mammon begins losing rounds. The escapade winds up with reconciled principals pushing puffy Mr. Palmiston through the portrait of Blue Bolt.
The Awful Truth (Columbia). Resourceful, humorous Director Leo McCarey (Ruggles of Red Gap, The Milky Way, Make Way For Tomorrow) takes a couple of derby hats, an ingratiating wire-haired fox terrier and three players without any special reputations as comedians, and spins a brightly-written Vina Delmar script into the gayest screen comedy the season has seen. In the process he establishes Irene Dunne as one of the top comediennes of current cinema, keeps Columbia's reputation for mature comedy (It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, Theodora Goes Wild) at its brightest. He also has his say on divorce, the double standard.
The urbane Warriners are on the verge of divorce because Jerry (Gary Grant) suspects that Lucy (Irene Dunne) has been carrying on with her music teacher and because Jerry came back from an alleged trip to Florida with a basket of California oranges. The decree, to become final in 90 days, grants Lucy custody of shaggy Mr. Smith (Asta of The Thin Man), allows Jerry occasional visits with the pup.
From this beginning, Director McCarey accelerates the comic pace, shows Lucy trying lamely but gamely to follow her new-found Oklahoma hearty (Ralph Bellamy) through the intricacies of "truckin'," singing prairie ballads in duo with him, listening to his tender homespun verse, with Jerry an amused and disturbing audience. As Lucy's life becomes more madly muddled, with three men complicating it, the comedy turns slapstick. High spots are Jerry's discomfiting brush with jujitsu at the expert hands of the singing teacher's Japanese houseboy, the free-for-all that follows Mr. Smith's canine persistence in playing go-find with two shriekingly circumstantial derby hats in Lucy's apartment. From this climax, when all Lucy's indiscretions are aired for the helpless mischances they really are, the rest is gay downgrade. Lucy commits delirious gaucheries in a Park Avenue drawing room to free Jerry from an entangling alliance, contrives a sprightly midnight reconciliation that must have given the Hays office a bad ten minutes.