The New Pictures

The Miracle of the Wolves. France has at last challenged for foreign cinema honors. With immense pomp, with money said to have been furnished by the French Government, the people of Paris have started turning out a series of historical pictures. Call it propaganda if you will. They expect to sell it to the world under the admission wicket.

This film was the first strip of celluloid ever to be unfurled before a flame in the Paris Opera. At that occasion, the President of the Republic was on hand and a monstrous array of notables. Paris responded to the trumpet and has been flocking subsequently to the Opera to see about the Wolves.

It is doubtful if America will float in similar endless flocks to the local production. The gorgeousness of the story has not been sufficiently reduced to a swiftly rising narrative. Through the opening reels, the characters are confused. Too many dukes and knights in armor and around the chess board are inclined to irritate your U. S. gum-chewer.

Thereafter, the picture jumps to its task, reveals itself as one of the greatest of the camera spectacles. Carcassonne was borrowed by the Government to show the seige of the medieval town. If you look in your histories, you will find the tale--how Jean Hachette, Jeanne d'Arc of the days of Louis XI, saved the seige of Beauvais. Mingled in the yarn is a startling wolf attack. All the players were French, many of them borrowed from the Odeon and Comedie. Some of the technique was borrowed from the U. S. The wolves were borrowed from Russia. From this assembly, a vigorous picture has developed-- in spots a great picture--but one that will cause D. W. Griffith scarcely a grieving gnash.

The Top of the World, James Kirkwood is invariably solemn and virtuous. He wins his woman. Usually he is an outdoor soul with all the calm irresistibility of a brooding oak. He grows, in the present instance, in Africa. Beside him grows his cousin, a dope fiend and a very unpleasant individual. Out comes the girl, in love with the latter. Suicides, hypnotism and a flood are employed to solve the somewhat reminiscent situation. Mr. Kirkwood plays a double part of the hero and the bum. Anna Q. Nilsson is the girl.

Salome of the Tenements. The odd contrast of a famed actor and an unknown player losing and failing respectively is the major item in this film's interest. The star is Godfrey Tearle (brother of Conway Tearle), an English actor of the first rank. In pictures, he flattens out and his personality fades. Opposite him is one Jetta Goudal. In her first leading part, she quite steals the strength of the picture. She is small and seems to resemble a combination of Marilyn Miller and Mary Hay. The picture plays about on the East Side (Manhattan) amid the slums, and pawnshops. The rich man from uptown marries the poor girl from Hester Street and the audience has only a fairly good time watching him do it.

Oh Doctor came from a book by Harry Leon Wilson and, like that earlier work of his Merton of the Movies, has survived the transformation sturdily. In fact, it has improved a trifle on the book. It automatically becomes one of the very funniest features of the spring. If Billups lives three years, he will inherit' three quarters of a million. He is doomed to die, so he borrows $100,000 to speed his last days. Most of the time he is a hypochondriac in a hospital bed. Mary Astor is his nurse. Their activities are not to be avoided.

Daddy's Gone A-Hunting is adapted from Zoee Aikens' play of that name. Daddy was presumably hunting for extra-nuptial affection and had set out on several expeditions. Mamma therefore began a little trip on her own account and the censors had a good deal of trouble keeping it all within the law. Alice Joyce and Percy Marmont did the best they could, but the story started thin and refused to put on weight.

Learning To Love. Constance Talmadge can be safely awarded the comic crown among our leading 'ladies. She is, of course, always politely comic. She does not fire pies; she flirts. In the current flirtation, she has somewhat fewer narrative devices than usual on which to sharpen the edges of her talents. She is the endless flirt who finally finds the man that does not collapse at her first grin. He does, of course, at her last.

New Lives for Old. When France is at war and the band plays the Marseillaise, you can hardly help responding. Particularly when the little dancing girl is foiling the wicked old German spies and saving her U. S. captain and his whole division. Armistice. Marriage. A lot of trouble with the folks at home. Betty Compson is a fairly bad actress, but you cannot help liking parts of the picture.