Word: whimseys
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More Than a Secretary (Columbia) can best be diagnosed as a minor symptom of Columbia's current attack of whimsey. To test the curriculum of her business school, Carol Baldwin (Jean Arthur) takes a job as secretary to Fred Gilbert (George Brent), carrot-nibbling editor of a health magazine. When she falls in love with Gilbert, Carol decides to humanize him. He proves the efficacy of her humanizing by falling in love, not with her but with her dullest pupil, Maizie (Dorothea Kent). Getting this situation straightened out involves some of the most uneven comedy dialog of the season...
...that production cost is not indispensable to box-office success. Adventure in Manhattan, which is not the work of Writer Robert Riskin and Director Frank Capra, may conceivably prove to the producers of It Happened One Night that box-office success is not necessarily the reward of second-hand whimsey...
...entertainment. As Vanessa, Helen Hayes, who last week announced that she would return to the stage for good after one more cinema rôle, contributes her anguished smile and her catch-in-the-throat voice. Robert Montgomery's efforts are improved by the exchange of his customary whimsey for a set of sideburns...
...elopes with his old mistress. The best man, Jeff Williams (Clark Gable), then spanks Mary with a hairbrush. These antics are intended to suggest that all three characters are urbane patricians, filled with charm and worldly wisdom. Lest the point remain in doubt, they speak exclusively in hard-boiled whimsey. When Jeff calls on Mary he kisses her and says: "Perfectly beautiful outside! How inside?" Mary: "Swell, inside." This means that Mary has forgotten Dill...
...Little Minister (RKO). That quality, usually defined as whimsey, which admirers of Sir James M. Barrie find so charming in his prose, is impossible to reproduce upon the screen. For this reason The Little Minister lacks some of the effect of the novel from which it was derived. It attempts, therefore, to substitute charms of its own. Because of the delicacy with which Director Richard Wallace handled the story, and the peculiar grace of Katharine Hepburn in the role that Maude Adams created in 1897, the substitution is entirely satisfactory...