ST. JAMES THEATRE.

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 137, 7 December 1938, Page 10

ST. JAMES THEATRE.

"Woman Against Woman."

• The age-old .triangle of a man and two women still finds novel and up-to-the-minute treatment in "Woman Against Woman," which opens on Friday at the St. James Theatre.; In this instance the man, Herbert Marshall, is a husband, and the women, Virginia Bruce and Mary Astor, are his second and first wives respectively, with, the first determined tllat his marriage to the second shall not be a success. In the hands of this,trio the story takes on telling conviction, with Marshall turning in a performance that rivals that of his father role in "Mad About Music." Miss Bruce is more charming than ever, and continues the steady dramatic advance she evidenced in "The First Hundred Years," and Miss Astor gives a skilful interpretation of a most unsympathetic role. A. picturisation of Margaret Culkin Banning's national magazine story, "Enemy Territory," the film presents a group of equally sparkling featured characterisations, among them Janet Beecher as Marshall's mother, Marjorie Rambeau as a senator's wife responsible for Marshall's first meeting with Miss Bruce, Juanita Quigley as the child who complicates the problems of the leading trio, and also Zeffie Tilbury, Sarah Padden, Betty Ross Clarke, Dorothy Christy, Morgan Wallace, and Joseph Creehan. Robert Sinclair, directing his first picture, has turned in a most workmanlike job. Shades of the Western heroes who starred in Hollywood's first horse operas are seen in the film. But where they once whirled lariats and banged away with six-shooters, they now saw a fiddle and sing lugubrious chants about "Little Joe the Wrangler" and the sad fate that befell him. There are three of them in "Woman Against Woman." The cowboys are complete with chaps and spurs, ten-gallon hats, and loud checked shirts. One of them plays a fiddle, another a guitar, and the third a piano-accordion, and altogether they sing down their noses in a plaintive wail reminiscent of a coyote baying at the moon. The cowboy interlude lends a lighter touch to the dramatic story unfolded in the film.