New Pictures

Running Wild (W. C. Fields). Ever since Herr Freud took to unsnarling the human mind, playwrights have reveled in the possibilities of Jeff's suddenly out-mutting Mutt. Not the least amusing of such fancies is this film in which Finch, the browbeaten, stumbles into an experiment in hypnotism and emerges Mr. Finch, brow-beater. Whereas his wife used to nag him, his son jeer at him, his boss sit on him, he now throws china at the picture of his wife's first husband, thrashes his son, bullies his boss, roars like a lion, and kicks the bleating lambs of whom he was once the gentlest.

The Unknown (Lon Chaney). Although his penchant for weird roles has occasioned many a jest,* audiences are beginning to realize that Lon Chaney stands on a pedestal of Hollywood, the one actor dedicated to the serious grotesque. His most recent incarnation is Alonzo, armless wonder of a traveling circus. In reality a full-bodied man, Alonzo straps himself into deformity in order to conceal from a hounding police that the double-thumbed hand identified with a notorious murder is his own. So accustomed is he to eating, drinking, smoking with his toes, that even when free from the straps, his hands dangle idle. Later, after being provoked to a second murder, he amputates the tell-tale arms. Impetuous Youth (Elizabeth Bergner, Conrad Veidt). Ufa, German producers famed for Variety, Siegfried, The Last Laugh, Faust and other inspired ventures, have bogged this time. Their heroine is a girl jealous of her stepmother's affection for her father. She leaves home, later flees school, to wander gypsy-like in the dress of a boy. The disguise is doubly efficient, for it conceals her femininity from the other actors, yet carefully keeps the audience apprised.

The Secret Studio (Olive Borden, Clifford Holland) is a room in the guts of the slums, where Artist Larry Kane paints beauteous model Rosemary with lust in his eye. The hero destroys the painting, thrashes the artist, marries the girl.

Lost at the Front (Charles Murray, George Sidney). From Manhattan at the beginning of the War sail a German and an Irishman; the first to join the German army, the second the Russian, because of his love for a Muscovite sculptress. Meeting on the muddy Eastern front, they decide to quit the War, and, dressed as women, march off into dark Russia. Embarrassing complications ensue when they blunder into the feminine Battalion of Death and are ordered to strip. Vanity (Leatrice Joy, Charles Ray). A characteristic of De Mille productions is that all display must be super-grand. Is it a ball? The room spreads as vast as Grand Central Terminal. Is the heroine a social lioness? Her train covers as much ground as the hall rug. The plot substance, by compensation, is minute. In this instance, the heroine visits a onetime admirer aboard his ship on the eve of her wedding to the hero. The admirer wants too much for his flattery, so she flees.

*One such jest: "Don't step on that spider! It might be Lon Chaney!"