Where Sinners Meet (RKO).

It is fortunate that none of the passengers in Channel Crossing (see above) encounters the hero of this picture on his way to the boat. Mr. Latimer (Clive Brook) owns a house on the Dover Road where it is his whimsy to detain persons bound for France for the purpose of meddling in their business. Unlike the morose financier in Channel Crossing, who would doubtless have murdered Mr. Latimer on sight, the people whom Mr. Latimer entertains in Where Sinners Meet are four amiable peewees, admirably suited to his favorite pastime of interrupting elopements to make sure that the participants are well matched. Leonard (Reginald Owen) is a gruff and ignorant milord running off with a charming lady named Anne (Diana Wynyard). Under Mr. Latimer's hospitable roof he is surprised to meet his wife Eustasia (Billie Burke) eloping with a toothy young bachelor named Nicholas (Alan Mowbray). By the time Mr. Latimer has given both his male guests colds in the head, stolen their razors and ruined their clothes to make them ridiculous, the two couples have been reshuffled. Leonard and Nicholas have sneaked away together. Fussy Eustasia is nursing the butler. Mr. Latimer and Anne are on their way to Dover.

That Where Sinners Meet is a genuinely amusing farce is due less to the smug whimsicalities of A. A. Milne's The Dover Road, from which it derives, than to the charm and delicacy with which it was directed by J. Walter Ruben and acted by an expert cast. Clive Brook is almost as funny while manipulating his guests into embarrassing situations as Reginald Owen while uttering sleepy roars of indignation at finding himself in a predicament he cannot understand. Diana Wynyard's cool and enigmatic smile gives an accent of high comedy to sequences which might otherwise have been childish. Good shot: Leonard, when he has drained a tumbler of Mr. Latimers whiskey, explaining that he has done so "under protest."

Upper World (Warner). Tedious in getting under way, this story of a rich man's troubles contrives a measure of suspense as soon as it introduces a double murder and a man hunt. A railroad tycoon (Warren William), neglected by his ambitious wife (Mary Astor), takes up with an honest little burlesque actress (Ginger Rogers). One night he calls on her just as her oldtime lover is attempting to force her to begin blackmail. Of the two shootings which follow, William performs one in obvious self-defense. After his quiet departure, the job looks like murder and suicide to all but one policeman. A burly flatfoot (Sidney Toler), whom William had caused to be demoted, has his suspicions. But William's power is such that the policeman is thwarted and presently jailed.

Adroitly in this sequence Author Ben Hecht and Director Roy Del Ruth let the audience's sympathies waver between the honest railman and the honest officer. Yet when the case is broken by newshawks and the picture moves to its routine end, everyone appears to have forgotten the policeman, last seen in his cell. Good shot: Toler losing his best piece of evidence, in the Police Commissioner's office.

Now I'll Tell by Mrs. Arnold Rothstein (Fox) has the distinction of the longest title out of Hollywood this year. It purports to be a biographical sketch of Arnold Rothstein, a notorious gambler whose murder, in Manhattan's Park Central Hotel in 1928, remains unsolved to this day.

In her book, Now I'll Tell, published last fortnight after it had been used by Director Edwin Burke as a script for this picture, Widow Rothstein gave an enlightening portrait of her husband. She records his first private words to her after their wedding at Saratoga during the races: "Sweet, I had a bad day today and I'll need your jewelry for a few days." She could tell when he was losing because although his face did not change, his voice grew flat. She told how he did not bother to watch the finish of a horse-race on which he won $800,000; how he arranged the hoax whereby Nicky Arnstein, for whom New York police had been hunting for six months, rode to headquarters to surrender in a touring car at the rear of a police parade.

The cinema lacks the exciting detail, the intimacy of the book but neither book nor picture will help the police clear up the Rothstein murder. The picture's hero, Murray Golden (Spencer Tracy), might be any screen gambler from Hollywood. The plot, in which a rival underworld character grows jealous of Golden's success, and Golden's wife (Helen Twelvetrees) and mistress (Alice Faye) contest for his affections are standard cinema fictions. Nonetheless, Spencer Tracy's smooth, poker-faced performance and Edwin Burke's colorful direction give Now I'll Tell by Mrs. Arnold Rothstein more authority than most such melodramas. Good shot: Golden, to conciliate a patron who has lost $40,000 in his gambling rooms, flipping a penny for double or quits.

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