The New Pictures

The Right to Romance (RKO). The problem child of RKO, Ann Harding, appears always in pictures which take the pulse of such throbbing questions as the double standard, woman's place in the home or how much a girl should tell her fiance. This time she is a celebrated facial surgeon, successful in her profession but harassed by longings for Romance. She marries a playboy (Robert Young) whose chief interests are listening to football games on the radio and looping-the-loop, only to discover her mistake in time to patch up after an airplane crash the face of the girl her husband should have married (Sari Maritza). "I forgot that I was grown-up," says she to the patient young doctor (Nils Asther) who has been waiting until she found it out. Typical shot: Sari Maritza trying to empty a flask when she is upside down.

Christopher Bean (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). At the house of a placid, kindly New England physician there arrives one day an art dealer who is curious about a young man, a painter, who died there many years before. The art dealer is followed by others of his kind. It turns out that the late Christopher Bean's paintings, considered worthless while he was alive, are now worth fabulous sums. The art dealers want to know whether the doctor had kept any.

The impact of this situation on the doctor (Lionel Barrymore), his avaricious wife (Beulah Bondi), his daughters and the family retainer (Marie Dressier), produces an unusually dextrous and amusing comedy, partly in the mood of Moliere farce, as it exposes greed and ingratitude in Dr. Haggett, partly as romance when it turns out that the Raggett's old-maid servant is not only the subject of a magnificent Bean portrait but also Bean's widow, tenderly devoted to his memory.

Produced last winter as a play, Christopher Bean emerges in the cinema only mildly impaired by scenes such as a wild ride in a dilapidated Ford and a preposterous interlude in a Pullman car, inserted to give Marie Dressier a chance to execute her comic chompings, blinkings and shoulder twitchings. Good shot: Beulah Bondi, when she wants him to cheat their old servant, urging Lionel Barrymore to think with his eyes closed.

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