Woman Chases Man (United Artists). Screenwriters Samuel & Bella Spewack (Boy Meets Girl) wrote a script and, after reading it, begged Producer Goldwyn to take their names off it, returned the money he had paid them. Director William Wyler, who had been given a vacation with all expenses paid, returned to Goldwyn $25,000 advanced to him in salary and expense money to be let off directing it. Miriam Hopkins offered to pay anything in reason not to star in it, at length agreed to give in and work if Goldwyn got Gregory LaCava to direct. Goldwyn got LaCava, but after reading the script LaCava left the lot. Andrea Leeds, a bit player, announced that she would rather starve than play the minor role for which she had been cast. Soon thereafter a large part of the Goldwyn organization filed into the boss's office, begged through a spokesman that he drop the picture. Goldwyn ignored them, had a new script written by Joseph Anthony, Manuel Seff and David Hertz, hired John Blystone to direct, changed the title from Princess and Pauper to The Woman's Touch and finally to the present one. Commenting on these facts, Hollywood Reporter, cinema trade daily, said: "Sam Goldwyn never has an easy time with any of his endeavors because he goes at them the hard way."

What, after viewing the results of these endeavors, astounded those who knew the picture's history was not Mr. Goldwyn's superior foresight but the fact that anybody should be moved either to violent objection to the material in hand or to stubborn faith in it. Woman Chases Man is a haywire story made in the mold of the current vogue for haywire stories. After wavering on the fringes of light comedy for a little while, it sheds its inhibitions and goes whole hog into farce.

Virginia Travis (Miriam Hopkins), an aspiring architectural student, applies to B. J. Nolan (Charles Winninger) for a job with his projected model suburb. She finds Nolan is bankrupt, his heartless son Kenneth (Joel McCrea). possessor of a million dollars, having refused to help him. Kenneth, a cautious man when sober, will buy anything when drunk, and the climax of Woman Chases Man is the way in which Miss Travis gets Kenneth's signature to the contract for Nolan Heights. Her efforts are complicated by the connivings of Nina Tennyson (Leona Maricle) whom Kenneth has brought home with him from European travels and who designs to victimize him so that she can live at ease with her true love Henri (Erik Rhodes). To forestall Virginia's schemes, Henri, at one point in the proceedings, chases her into a magnolia tree. To forestall Henri, Virginia's ally (Ella Logan) bites Henri in the leg (see cut).

At the first preview of Woman Chases Man, the audience's response to incidents like this was eminently satisfactory. Best sequences: Travis applying for a job; B. J. cooking hunter's thrush; the fight for the pen with which Kenneth is to sign the contract parodying the fight for the pistol which is the great traditional ending of Westerns.

Kid Galahad (Warner). Prizefight pictures, once a staple product of the cinema industry, have been out of fashion since The Prizefighter and the Lady. First of its sort since the resounding failure of that venture in 1933. Kid Galahad, adapted from a realistic Saturday Evening Post story by Francis Wallace, improves on the old formula by concerning itself less with the ring prowess of its hero, Ward Guisenberry (Wayne Morris) than with the grimy background of the fight industry as exemplified by his manager, Nick Donati (Edward G. Robinson). Nicknamed Kid Galahad when, as an unsophisticated bellhop, he knocks out the heavyweight champion of the world for insulting Nick's mistress, Fluff (Bette Davis), at a hotel orgy, Ward finds himself plunged into a melange of chicanery, gun feuds and undercover romance. Grooming Ward for the championship is for Nick subsidiary to his main purpose of revenging himself on the champion's manager, a gunman named Turkey Morgan (Humphrey Bogart). The likelihood that Ward will enable him to accomplish this by repeating his hotel-room knockout is endangered when Nick suspects his protege of an intrigue with Fluff. Now intent on revenging himself on his own fighter, Nick sends Ward into the ring with instructions calculated to allow the champion, whose manager has been informed of the plan, to win. Halfway through the fight, Fluff and Nick's sister (Jane Bryan), with whom Ward is actually in love, convince Nick of his error. Nick then reverses his signals, Ward wins the title, and Nick and Turkey settle their differences by gunplay.

Principal virtue of Kid Galahad is a verisimilitude which is not confined to Wayne Morris' ring appearances, and these are among the most realistic scenes of the sort yet portrayed on the screen. The picture exhibits pugilism's backstage activities in bars, night clubs and areaways with such faithfulness that an audience of sportswriters, managers and boxing officials invited to a Manhattan preview last week amused themselves by trying to identify the characters. Said Madison Square Garden's jaunty Fight-Promoter Jimmy Johnston, who is currently embroiled with the New York State Athletic Commission, when Nick Donati tells Ward to meet him at the Commission's office: "That guy can't be me. The Commissioners won't let me in."

The realism of Kid Galahad was achieved not by hiring a real fighter to perform in it, as Max Baer did in The Prizefighter and the Lady, but by giving a course in pugilism to the unknown young Los Angeles actor who had been picked for the title role. Handsome Wayne Morris, 23, whose athletic activities at Los Angeles Junior College (see p. 44) had been confined to football, basketball and fencing, trained for a month before shooting started. In the picture, his fight for the heavyweight championship was far more strenuous than most real heavyweight contests. It lasted a week. When it ended his opponent (William Haade, a onetime steelworker) was hospitalized for a fortnight with an ankle sprained by falling at the knockout. In the picture, Kid Galahad's most spectacular victory before he wins the title is against a heavyweight named "O'Brien." O'Brien is really Bob Westell, leading California heavyweight, who this week fights Bob Pastor at Los Angeles in the first major heavyweight Dout of the season.

Wings Over Honolulu (Universal). By no means completely overlooked in the screen's previous investigations of the U. S. Navy on land, sea and air, the domestic problems of a Navy wife receive more extensive attention than usual in this placid little study of aviation and romance in the Pacific. Lauralee Curtis (Wendy Barrie) meets Flight Lieutenant Stony Gilchrist (Ray Milland) when he makes a forced landing on her Virginia plantation the night of her 20th birthday party. Before they have time to consummate their prompt marriage, he is ordered to Honolulu. Lauralee finds service life so monotonous there that when an old admirer appears in his yacht, she takes a night off, thus causing her mercurial husband to stunt a combat plane and wreck a bomber. All this endangers his career which shows signs of progressing properly again only after Lauralee's penitent testimony has convinced a court-martial that her husband's outbreak was her fault.

A minor but definitely pleasant contribution to the screen's huge dossier on what becomes of taxpayers' money, Wings Over Honolulu possesses striking negative virtues: taps are never sounded, the handsome lieutenant's crony and shipmate (William Gargan) does not die in a crash and no one rescues anyone from anything. Typical shot: Lauralee and another Navy wife discussing, while they wash dishes, how they hate the sound of airplanes.

Dreaming Lips (United Artists) is an English adaptation of Henri Bernstein's French play Melo, produced and directed in London by Paul Czinner and starring his wife, Elisabeth Bergner, who made her international screen reputation in a German version of the same play four years ago. Actress Bergner's unvarying specialty, on stage or screen, is what is known as running -the -gamut -of -the -emotions With all the other plays in the world to choose from, the reason she has made Melo twice is apparently that this vehicle if it does nothing else, offers opportunities for gamut-running which are practically unparalleled. Gaby, heroine of Dreaming Lips, is married to a jolly little orchestra leader (Romney Brent) and infatuated with a saturnine concert violinist (Raymond Massey). While with her husband she is maternal, gamine, whimsical, loyal" and inhibited. While with her violinist she is bold, coy, passionate, guilty and abandoned. When, having gone to break off her affair with the violinist because her husband needs her more, Gaby instead misbehaves, she is bewildered by herself. She writes a letter of farewell and jumps into the Thames.

For connoisseurs of gamut-running, Dreaming Lips will constitute practically the equivalent of the Kentucky Derby. Familiar with the track, Actress Bergner covers it in record time and is breezing at the finish. For other cinemaddicts even its rather startling deviations from the Hays Organization Production Code, now so scrupulously observed by Hollywood, are not likely to make Dreaming Lips seem more than a pretentious diagnosis of a trivial neurosis. Typical shot: Actress Bergner coiling her brow to indicate a short spin down the gamut when, at a night club, she suggests to her escort that they dance.

Under the Red Robe (20th Century-Fox). When Cardinal Richelieu (Raymond Massey), after the Huguenot rebellion of 1629, was treating France to a religious and political blood purge, his principal enemy was Edmond, Due de Foix (F. Wyndham Goldie), fugitive leader of the Huguenots. To capture Edmond, the Cardinal detailed one Gil de Berault (Conrad Veidt), a swordsman under death sentence for dueling. Richelieu specified that if Berault brought back his prisoner his sentence would be remitted; if he failed, he would be hanged. At the Foix castle, Berault mistook the Duke's sister Marguerite (Annabella) for his wife and fell in love with her before he found out his mistake. For her part, she was sure he was a spy until he offered such ingenious proof of his good faith that she forgave him with considerable tenderness. Faced with a choice between betraying his employer or his love. Berault, having seized the Duke, turned him loose and rode back to Paris for his punishment. Fortunately the Cardinal decided to be lenient.

Made in England by Robert T. Kane, based on the famed Stanley J. Weyman novel produced by the old Goldwyn company in 1923, this is a costume romance in the grand traditional manner. A director's picture, it is a dramatic vindication of the talents of sensitive, laborious Victor Seastrom who, after making pictures like He Who Gets Slapped (Norma Shearer & Lon Chaney) and Wind (Lillian Gish), became discredited in Hollywood because he was supposed to be oldfashioned.

The great charm and no small part of the power of Under the Red Robe is that it is oldfashioned. It combines with the tight construction and taut playing of modern screen technique the flowing, subtle photographic language that the great silent directors practiced. Instead of the mechanical alternations of long shot, medium shot, close shot which became static soon after cameras began to talk, Seastrom follows his action from whatever point seems most relevant to the material. When Berault mounts the gibbet, the frame cuts off six steps. Only his legs are visible when a voice calls "Come down." The camera, conscious that his legs, not his emotions, tell the story, never rises to his face as he turns to descend.

Almost as important as Seastrom's camera are the superb sets and the performances of Veidt and Annabella. Incredible especially is Veidt, whose bony face and huge frame, as if composed not of flesh but of the imperishable substance of illusion itself, have kept cinemakers busy for the last 20 years, still look no older than they did when he made The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1921).

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