Most of us like the balm of a little sentiment scattered sweetly here and there throughout the length of a serious movie, a kind of salve to smooth the rough edges of the plot; but literally to take a bath in the ointment is neither pleasant nor logical. And such was "To Mary With Love." It was a bathtub of sentiment, and it was neither pleasant nor logical.

"To Marry With Love" is no blot on the escutcheons of Warner Baxter or Myrna Loy, for the script's the script--stretch it, pamper it, bolster it as you may. The show starts with the marriage of Baxter and Myrna Loy, he a conscientious, hard-working architect; and she apparently a conventionally affectionate young bride. As the show progressed Baxter remained true to his original type, and to this added occasional drunken sprees which involved him, rather innocently, though not deeply with a gay young thing named Kitty. Naturally this brought chastisement from his wife. But she failed to realize that incidents of this kind only occurred when she was away in Maine having a good time "before she was ninety" and he in New York working over a drafting table from one year's end to the other. Myrna Loy gradually assumed a dual personality; that of the understanding, steadfast wife, and that of the quasi-loyal wife who lays bare all her domestic troubles to a male friend when she should have kept them religiously to herself. The stock market crash in 1929 wiped out all his money, and the depression left him without a job. Through it all we could see no waning in his affection for her, even though he turned to drink intermittently, but somehow his wife did. To cap it all, Baxter is persuaded by her confidant-lawyer, to whom she eventually appealed for divorce proceedings, that he has bitterly oppressed his wife by his selfish conduct. Then Baxter, the only logical character in the whole cast, makes the only illogical move of his performance when he humbly bows to his vacillating wife, and all live happily ever after. Tragic, we should say, tragic especially when the writer of the script himself deserts the poor here.

The second feature on the bill, "Spend thrift," although not much to speak of, at least does not pretend to be serious. It is the crude isle of a designing woman marrying a dumb aristocrat for money. However, Henry Fonda and George Barber with a great many really funny wise cracks, and their humorous gyrations make for ridiculous coincidence. There is more honest enjoyment in "Spendthrift" than "To Mary With Love.