"Comrade X"

The Young Communist League and New Masses are shrieking "sabotage," but for the first time since "Ecstasy" Lamarr makes l'amour and makes it right. Don't misunderstand--Hays hasn't let everything go and Hedy doesn't get negligent with her negligee again. Rather, she has finally found a part where her flat, undramatic voice isn't out of place. Cast as an old-fashioned Communist who believes the executions should be stopped while there still are a few Russians left, Hedy is crossed up by her tutor who becomes state censor and executioner himself after arranging a fatal accident for his predecessor. The line of Russians that become Kremlin corpses after getting that job looks like a parade course in Sociology with Oscar Homolka standing out as Vasiliev, the Bolshevik bloodhound's bloodhound. Both Clark Gable and Hedy get on the Reds' blacklist, he because his journalistic scoops have been smuggled out of Stalinland and she because her father (tap irvisaged Felix Bressart) was too nosey. But though Hedy's only a valet's daughter, she can wear as well as press the pants. Stealing a Russian tank, she leads Gable and half the Red horde in a Balkan invasion as part of one of the funniest reels in film history. The picture as a whole, however, is not quite so hotchka as "Ninotcha." Where Garbo used a scalpel in her satirical analysis, Gable uses a sledge hammer. Despite its heavy-handed anti-Marxisms, though, "Comrade X" is topnotch comedy.

With vest pocket Romeo Roland Young furthering the careers of a lot of hardworking blondes--some further than others--and doing it on the budget of a wife so tight that she sends paper napkins out to be dry cleaned, it takes Anna Neagle to straighten everything out. While combing mistresses out of her Uncle Bluebeard's whiskers, Miss Neagle sings, dances, and acts as well as ever. The word is "Yes" for "No, No, Nanette."