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More beautiful, perhaps, than Columbia's Grace Moore and RKO's Lily Pons, Paramount's operatic diva Gladys Swarthout struggles valiantly through this musical soufflé, which stubbornly refuses to rise. It is not Miss Swarthout's fault alone -- screenwriters Frank Partos and Anne Morrison Chapin certainly didn't do her any favors -- but the lady does seem rather disinterested. John Boles, meanwhile, is as wooden as always and even John Barrymore fails to breathe life into the concoction. Only Fritz Feld and Curt Bois, as a couple of gentlemen's gentlemen, make Romance in the Dark worthwhile viewing, and neither is onscreen long enough. The operetta proved Swarthout's final, the songbird's last film, Ambush (1939), containing not a single aria.