Our chief pleasure at the University this week was in thinking of the good time we will doubtless have next Saturday at "Barbary Coast." For both pictures on the Square this time are pretty bad. We have plot G-63, served up with slight variations; plus comedy situation. Series X-12, in "Hands Across the Table," with Carole Lombard (who is getting old and looks it) and Fred Mac Murray, who is the one and only bright spot. Plot 48-R (the crusty old dame who turns out to have a heart of gold) bobs up again under the title "Three Kinds and a Queen," with May Robson. Neither picture is very good.

In the second picture, May Robson makes herself one of the silliest, most absurdly anti-social, hard-old-women we have ever seen, and her softening up in the end is terrible in its sentimentality. If, as the University's blurb-sheet says, the part "fits her like a glove," Miss Robson can't be the grand old lady we like to think her. She ends by adopting a bunch of going children as crazy as herself.

Again quoting the blurb-sheet, the University do scribes "Hands Across the Table" as "an hilarious romantic comedy of young love in a modern workaday world, centering mainly about the adventures in the life of a pretty, ambitious manicurist, who, tired of being a working girl, decides to capture a rich husband, regardless of whether she loves him or not." And this is about what it is, though it's not particularly hilarious, nor very romantic. Silly would be a better word. Needless to say, she does not marry for money, but for love--you can see that coming the very beginning, particularly if you know this plot, which you almost certainly do. Yes, you've seen it all before, and it's not very well done this time. The variation here is that the sympathetic friend (who really loves her, of course), is a cripple, which adds sentiment. The picture has its bright moments, however.

Nope, butter wait until Sunday.