Cinema: The New Pictures: Jan. 3, 1938

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Thereafter the story rolls merrily along with Tatiana and Mikail, who change their names to Tina and Michel, converting their bourgeois employers to White Russian ways. Young Georges (Maurice Murphy) learns fencing and poker from Michel, vies with his father (Melville Cooper) for Tina's favor. Mama Dupont (Isabel Jeans) and pretty daughter Helene (Anita Louise) vie for Michel's. One evening Soviet Commissar Gorotchenko (Basil Rathbone) comes to dinner, prepared to sell out the Russian oil rights in Baku and Petrovolsk unless he can get his hands on the 40 billion Tsarist francs. Gorotchenko is an old acquaintance of the Ouratieffs. In revolutionary days he had tortured Mikail with burning cigaret ends, "questioned" Tatiana in a highly questionable manner. That he is not without a certain charm, in spite of his villainy, is evident when he leaves the Dupont household with the Tsar's 40 billion. In return he promises to have the mustache erased from Tatiana's portrait in the imperial palace.

Hollywood looks to Claudette Colbert for its highest grade of upper crust, and in Tovarich Actress Colbert never lets Hollywood or the play down. She is imperious, embittered, chauvinistic to the last shattering Tsarish toast. Charles Boyer, freed again from the limitations of prescribed parts (Archduke Rudolf of Austria in Mayerling, Napoleon in Conquest), enjoys writing his own ticket as Prince Ouratieff, helps the film through its dull beginnings by incorrigibly slurring over unimportant dialogue. In his brief, belated appearance, suave, self-assured Basil Rathbone, as usual, steals the show.

Rosalie (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Since Actor Nelson Eddy was schooled for five weeks by Lieut. Frederick M. Thompson in the proper bearing of a West Point undergraduate, it is obvious that no embarrassment to the Academy was intended by casting him as Cadet Dick Thorpe, No. 1 West Point football player, aviator and singer. Nevertheless, there are times when even civilians feel uncomfortable about the things he does in Rosalie. There is a march to a supper dance after a football game when a lot of chorus boys dressed up in cadet uniform link arms four abreast and follow Eddy and Ray Bolger, wagging their heads and singing The Caissons Go Rolling Along. Whether a West Pointer would sing a serenade outside a Vassar dormitory, even if he could sing like Eddy, remains dubious but just possible. Less possible is the reply made by Cadet Thorpe when Rosalie (Eleanor Powell) sticks her head out of the window and asks him who he is and what he is doing: 'I'm your dream soldier reporting for duty."