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In her first picture since Queen Christina, Greta Garbo gives a triumphant performance. As beautiful as ever but less numb than usual, she achieves the difficult feat of making Katrin seem more a human being than a fictionized heroine. Richard Boleslavski's direction is slow but sure; the picture gathers power steadily toward the finish. Its only thoroughly weak spot is a Chinese festival staged by Chester Hale to lend "production value"—a sequence which looks as if it had just finished an engagement at the Winter Garden. Good shot: Greta Garbo at dinner wondering how much her husband knows.
Jealousy (Columbia). To a familiar subject this picture adds only a few superficial footnotes. A prize-fighter (George Murphy) meditates dubiously the relation between his fiancée (Nancy Carroll) and her employer. After he marries her and goes broke, the doll-faced wife gets a new job from the old employer, whose identity she conceals from her husband. The prize-fighter discovers the two together just after they have been viewing samples of costume jewelry. In a scuffle the employer is killed. The prize-fighter wanders off in a daze while his wife is tried and convicted of murder. He returns in time to confess. How and why the prize-fighter escapes the electric chair, cinema audiences will understand only if they have seen the very beginning of Jealousy and waited patiently to the very last. Audiences who miss the whole thing will not be losers.
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College Rhythm (Paramount). Three years ago, a second-rate vaudeville comedian, worried by a cold audience in Birmingham, Ala., acted on an irrational inspiration. He rushed out of the wings, whined at the master of ceremonies: "Wanna buy a duck?"
That idiotic question was the beginning of one of vaudeville's characteristically fabulous success stories. Second-rate Comedian Joe Penner, born Joseph Pinta at Nadgybeck Kereck, Hungary, became almost immediately a first-rate comedian. He got a tour with Paramount Publix stage shows, a contract for 15 Warner Brothers shorts. In the course of the next two years, he had two more inspirations: 1) "You nasty man!" 2) "Don't never do that!" By 1933, all three had become household slogans. Because of his radio popularity, Joe Penner's weekly salary jumped from $500 to $7,500.
Before he became a vaudeville actor, Joe Penner had been a choir boy, magazine salesman, Ford filing clerk, property man for an act called "Rex the Mind Reader." He became an actor in 1923 when the comedian in the preceding skit deserted his show. Now married to a onetime chorus girl named Eleanor May Vogt, he has an Episcopal minister named Henry Scott Rubel write his songs. Nervous, shy and solemn in private life, he plays the violin, likes to make things with tools, hopes some day to be a dramatic writer.