The Moviegoer

"Smart Blonde" is an amusing, fast moving crookfest, with Barton MacLane and Glenda Farrell doing the detecting. Fortunately it is not marred by the tommygun histrionics usual in such pictures. A few witty cracks fly here and there to good effect, and on the whole the picture serves as a mild antidote to premature spring fever.

Addicts of hard-boiled police Houtenants will be intrigued by MacLane's wood-rasp voice, with which he does the thinking that finally cracks the case. An honest gambler tries to sell his properties to a friend he hopes will run them with equal integrity, in order that in may marry a Boston girl who doesn't like roulette. This admirable attempt is thwarted by the murder of the gambler's friend, and the chase is on. Another murder throws suspicion on all sorts of people, but MacLane and Farrell are never fooled for a minute, or at least not for long. The final upshot of all this confusion may not be divulged, but suffice it to say that the Puritaness is not all she might be.

"Green Light," the screen version of Lloyd Douglas' best-seller, has already been reviewed in these columns. It is an average film concerning the medical profession, but the dramatic values of a hospital have been well-recorded by the photographer. In its less noble moments it is a very passable picture.