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Rockabye (RKO) marks the début of Constance Bennett as a tragedienne. She is Judy Carrol, a successful actress with a gashouse past and a dipsomaniac mother. What she wants more than anything else is a baby. She tries to adopt one but the child's custodians decide Judy is incapable of providing it with a proper environment...
During the filming of this picture, which she selected for herself, Constance Bennett lost ten pounds. This was not the only mishap in connection with Rockabye. A version of it made last summer with Phillips Holmes in Joel McCrea's role was so unsuccessful that RKO did the whole thing over again, with Jane Murfin & Kubec Glasmon to rewrite Horace Jackson's script and George Cukor directing instead of George Fitzmaurice. It emerges finally as a first-grade program picture, lachrymose but reasonable, brightened by Jobyna Howland's expert characterization of Judy's tippling mother. Instructive...
...Phantom of Crestwood (RKO). Before this mystery picture was released last fortnight, it was exploited in an ingenious way. Once a week for six weeks National Broadcasting Company (like RKO a subsidiary of Radio Corp. of America) broadcast chapters worked up from the scenario of the picture. The radio script did not reveal the solution to the mystery; radio listeners were invited to suggest conclusions for the story, for $6,000 in prizes. The prize contest disguised the real purpose of the broadcast: to create such suspense among the radio audience that all would rush to see the cinema. Advertisements...
Secrets of the French Police (RKO), secrets wholly unlike those of the U. S. police, form a pleasantly lurid fable in which the Paris gendarmery is faced with the improbable task of snaring a rogue whose nastiest proclivity is for turning his enemies into statues. This rogue (Gregory Ratoff) abducts a happy and prosperous flower girl (Gwili André), murders her aged father and plants evidence to incriminate her pickpocket lover. Then, in his shadowy chateau, he sets about hypnotizing her into a counterfeit princess, since he needs one for dishonest purposes. The prefect of police (Frank Morgan) is clever...
...RKO Keith-"Washington Merry GoRound." Film adaptation of the book which has created some thing of a sensation. Lee Tracy and Constance Cummings starring. Opens today...