Cinema: What Every Woman Knows

What Every Woman Knows (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is that many a wife is responsible for her husband’s success. The neat and genial comedy in which Sir James Barrie expressed this sentiment was first produced in the U. S. in 1908 with Maude Adams playing the lead, revived in 1926 for Helen Hayes. Helen Hayes has the same part in the cinema version— that of Maggie Wylie who marries a solemn young Scot against his will, helps him get elected to Parliament, manages his career for him so unobtrusively that he considers his accomplishments inspired by a glamorous outsider. Only when John Shand (Brian Aherne) tries to get along without Maggie does he begin to realize what she has meant to him and why she has tried not to let him see it.

Reduced to plot, there is little that is new to the cinema in the story of John and Maggie Shand. Nor can the picture’s charm be ascribed to Scottish atmosphere, scrupulously maintained, from the unavoidable scene in which Maggie and John sing “Loch Lomond” in the parlor to the MGM gesture of reproducing in every detail a real Scottish railway train for one brief sequence. Behind such externals lies the warm, human sympathy of an author whose works should eventually prove as popular in Hollywood as those of Charles Dickens are at present. Good shot: Dudley Digges, as Maggie’s fumbling, devoted brother, expressingconsternation when he hears that John Shand is going to leave her.