Cinema: The New Pictures: Aug. 15, 1932

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Doctor X (First National). In cinema's extensive rogues' gallery, lately increasing at an alarming rate, there is no more horrid villain than the one who functions in this picture. A lunatic physician, his habit is to gobble human flesh by the light of the moon, using his scalpel for a butter-knife. He wears for disguise not charcoal or false-whiskers but "synthetic flesh." It would be bad enough if he were the only bogeyman in Doctor X, but in order to supply suspense it is necessary for the picture to include others almost as vicious. The only pleasant people in the cast are Lee Tracy, a jittering reporter as usual, Fay Wray, a typical horror story ingenue, and Lionel Atwill.

Atwill is Doctor Xavier (no clue). He is head of a medical institute which the police think must be harboring a mur derer. Rather than have his institute closed, Dr. Xavier asks for a chance to apprehend the criminal. He does so in a pseudo-scientific manner, by entertaining his staff members at a re-enactment of a murder and observing from their pulses which one gets most perturbed. Aside from the depravity of the villain and the fact that it is filmed in technicolor. Doctor X is a routine nightmare. It has skeletons in every closet, a trembling maid named Mamie, and is intended for avid patrons of synthetic horror rather than for normal cinemaddicts.

Guilty as Hell (Paramount) is notable chiefly because its title contains a sample of frankly colloquial profanity. It is an adaptation of Daniel Rubin's murder play, Riddle Me This, in which a jealous physician (Henry Stephenson) kills his wife and then helps a muddle headed detective (Victor McLaglen) try to pin the crime on an innocent young man (Richard Arlen) whose pretty sister (Adrienne Ames) is admired by the detective's news monger friend (Edmund Lowe).