New Picture

My Life With Caroline (United Producers; RKO Radio). Caroline (Anna Lee) does not possess the studied virtuosity of the S. J. Perelman heroine who left the room in high dudgeon and returned in low dudgeon, just to show her versatility. But she is an exasperatingly contradictory female. Life confounds her. Attention is her dish. Her water-bug mind, attractively camouflaged by a pert, pretty face and curly, blonde topknot, tends to forget people when they aren't around.

This trait is a nuisance for her adoring, rich, hard-working publisher husband (Ronald Colman). For Caroline's heart is warm and wide and susceptible to dilettant males who are forever seeing "the essential Caroline," to flashy Latins looking for a wealthy woman who can "ride and shoot and rope a steer." Her capacity for bemused self-deception keeps Husband Colman busy wooing her back from each butterflight.

Early in My Life With Caroline Husband Colman confides his problem to his audience in one of the theater's oldest pieces of business, the aside. Discovering his wife rendezvousing with a curly-headed hacendado (Gilbert Roland), he invites his audience to see what his life with Caroline ("Bless her little heart") has been.

That life, commingled with a sculptor's (Reginald Gardiner) who models "the essential Caroline" in brass (see cut), turns out to be less exciting than it promises to be. For Director Lewis Milestone has forsaken action for a series of static scenes bowed down under too much talk. The talk is sometimes funny, seldom convincing. But oldtime Actor Colman, now a greying 50, turns in a neat performance in his offhand, sotto voce manner, and England's Anna Lee (in her first big-time U.S. cinema role) is a first-rate Caroline.

Miss Lee, who is the wife of RKO Director Robert Stevenson, thought she had retired from the cinema when Milestone saw her in a British picture and cabled London to get her for Caroline. London told him to see Stevenson in Hollywood. He did. Milestone: "This cablegram says you know something about a woman named Anna Lee. I think she's what we want for my picture. Where is she?" Stevenson: "About four feet away from you. You have your back to her."

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