Robert Taylor no longer loves Greta Garbo; it is Jean Harlow now. The two of them are quite unsentimental about it, and do their best to amuse us for an hour and a half or so, in "Personal Property". But their best is not good enough. They are equipped with the undistinguished material of the H. M. Harwood stage piece "Man in Possession". It gives them little to go on, and they get even by giving it little in return. It is all about a black sheep, lovable as all black sheep are, who pursues his nincompoop brother's fiancee, first as a pest, then as a sheriff's deputy, and then as a butler. Of course the respectable brother doesn't want her any more when he finds she's a pauperess, so the black sheep gets her and all is bliss.

The comedy is none too subtly, or for that matter none too well, supplied by a cluster of Englishmen on the order of Mutt and Jeff's friend, Sir Sidney. They mumble and fumble and glare in the approved comic-strip fashion. Then there is the Cockney, who it is probably feared would lose his identity if he were allowed to very from show to show.

The main difficulty is that neither Robert Taylor nor Jean Harlow acts. Robert Taylor has concluded that all that is expected of him is to be irresistibly boyish, which he sets out to be ad nauseam. Jean Harlow, on the other hand, thinks her whore job done if she glowers her way through the show and charges around squalling away in the most strident voice she can muster. Occasionally she sees fit to force the wannest of smiles, which can scarcely compensate anybody for all the termagancy he has witnessed.

"Devil's Playground" is all about how a naval officer marries a no-good woman, punches his best friend on the jaw when he finds him kissing her, decides to let the man suffocate when he sinks to the bottom of the ocean in a submarine, since he alone in all the navy can dive deep enough to rescue him, but goes and fetches him up at the very last minute, when he learns what a wicked siren he is married to. There is no objection to the familiarity of these elements; one might only wish that they were joined together in a slightly different pattern. Still, if you don't mind seeing a show a third or fourth time under a new name, and if you like lusty, elemental drama, you'll have no kick coming. For Richard Dix, Chester Morris, and Dolores Del Rio do their respective tasks to perfection. Before the caviling mood is passed, it might be observed that in the final scene, in China, Richard and Chester's telling us in discordant song that Abdul Abulbul Ameer fought in the ranks of the Tsar, is likely to be resented by admirers of the old ballad as an unpardonable confusion.