"Oh, I can't go on!" screams Ruth Chatterton in a moment of high mechanical emotion; but alas, she does go on, and on, and on, until the audience of "Female," current epic at the Metropolitan, is ready to weep with sympathy for the poor girl so driven by the desperate struggle for cakes and caviar. The case of Ruth Chatterton should be taken up by a Society for the Prevention of. If she could act, she might be a beautiful actress, if she were beautiful. About all that can be said for her is summarized in the title of the movie.

It's all about a career woman who has to discover that women were meant for babies. Alison Drake, president of Drake Motors, femalefactor of great wealth, discusses automatic clutches and the stock market in the day time, and seduces handsome engineers and secretaries with vodka in her palace at night. Unfortunately all the men are willing. Not until the man who doesn't want to comes along does she discover the real things in Life. Unfortunately for the general effect, George Brent, the man who can't be made, does a rather good dominant male.

Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians, on the stage, put on a lot of horseplay which, for people who like horseplay, is very good horseplay. The best thing in the whole program, despite its incongruity and questionable taste, is a solo rendition of the Ave Maria by Stuart Churchill, tenor of merit. There are some boop-o-doop girls and some bird imitators. The festive evening is rounded out with an inconceivably asinine organ solo, with words on the screen about the relative merits of Jamaica Plain and South Boston as places to call home. It all ends with a cheer for dear old Boston.