Aside from rather meaningless titles, the two films at Keith's Memorial this week-end present the best rounded twin bill we've witnessed this season. "The Woman I Love", starring Paul Muni and Miriam Hopkins, tells the story of the usual love triangle against a background of the front line trenches on the Soissons sector in 1917, while "We Have Our Moments", a gay and riotous farce of twenty years later, put the audience in giggles the moment the news reel before it subsided and left many in the aisles exhausted at the end of the hour and a half it held the screen.
"The Woman I Love" is far the greater picture: its two themes that weave in and out like strands in a symphony are the unpredictable, uncontrollable actions of two men who are in love with the same woman--the futility and sacrifice and tragedy of such a situation--and the similar and strikingly parallel futility and sacrifice and tragedy of war.
Paul Muni plays the role of an infantry officer turned aviator, but after losing several partners in battle he falls victim to the distrust of his squadron mates, who believe him jinxed. Louis Hayward, a fellow officer, strikes up a friendship with him and makes his machine gunner in several brilliant air-raids. Meanwhile, in Paris and at camp, Hayward has fallen in love with Miriam Hopkins, Muni's wife, and this time it's no design for living. A situation that sacrifices the friendship of the two men on the altar of a woman's love can only result in the death of one of the lovers, and with superb irony it is Hayward who dies, leaving Muni to go back, broken by the ordeal, to his unfaithful spouse. And for the war which causes the folly and the insane madness of men, one can feel only extreme distaste.
"We Have Our Moments", the fun-fest alluded to above, shows the other side of life, with James Dunn and Sally Eilers co-starring in an international money smuggle that has dialogue that sparkles like champagne. And after outwitting an international gangster, who looks very much like a former head of the Chase Bank who shall go nameless, and a magnificent French detective, the two wind up in Monte Carlo, in each other's arms of course.
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