Against the sands of the Yuma desert in Arizona, Metro-Goldyn Mayer has strung out an exciting story of the white woman who is charmed by the call of the desert and a wily philandering Arab in the person of Ramon Navarro. The story is old, the treatment is older, and not even a trio of the best second-rate stars in Culver City can give any more glamour to the exhausted Sahara, but withal "The Barbarian" now playing at the University Theatre in the Square is entertaining in a mild harmless way.

Myrna Loy, who has probably appeared in more different lands in movie versions than any other star, is the lovely white woman who falls under the spell of her Arab dragomen escorting her into the sands where she is to meet Reginald Denny, her fiance. One anticipates she will be carried off to the tribe and married by force. She is kidnapped but a blow across the face convinces the Arab that she doesn't like fooling, and his prize goes back to her white engineer. With a price on his head Jamil returns to Cairo and just as Diana is about to become leashed forever to her beloved bridge-builder, she hears one of Jamil's Arab love songs which are pretty sour. She can't resist, and so she's off. The picture's like that.

The companion piece shows Miriam Hopkins in an unusual role. As "Temple Drake" she wallows through a muck of William Faulkener situations with a drunken Southern boy, captured by gangsters, fascinated with the gang leader Trigger, ably played by William LaRue, she runs the gamut of degradation and disgrace to show you that the Southern girl at nineteen is dangerous, inbred, and crawling with complexes.

After living in sin with the Trigger, the upright young lawyer who had proposed to her, finds them. She shoots the Trigger who had killed the drunken boy and comes to trial before her father, a rugged judge. It all turns out nicely and the audience goes home happy. One hears that George Raft refused to take the nasty part, fearing to get a snaky reputation and be hissed by the kiddies like William Powell or Wallace Berry.