The New Pictures

Wolf Song (Paramount). Hill scenery is the background of this intelligent attempt to fit music into a romantic story. The foreground is Lupe Velez, who sings attractively and shrilly through her teeth. Gary Cooper is a gangling Kentucky boy who loves and kidnaps a Mexican girl and is harassed at last by the conflict between his memory of the girl's sweet singing and the fleering chantey of the mountaineers.

Vivacious and increasingly competent as an actress, Lupe Velez was born in San Luis Potosi, seven days by donkey from Mexico City. When she was twelve she danced at a church festival. A booking agent, impressed, hired her as ballerina for a theatrical troupe. Her family thought a convent would be better for her. After two years in Our Lady of the Lake, at San Antonio, Tex., she went back to Mexico to dance. She was in Monterey with a musical comedy called Rataplan when someone from Hollywood saw her and took her north. She worked for a month in Hal Roach comedies, then as Douglas Fair-banks's leading lady in The Gaucho. Brunette, she is five feet high, weighs 105 pounds, can play the ukelele, likes dancing best.

Her press agentry recently included a story of Lupe's gifts from her leading-man ("sweetie"), Gary Cooper. These were two live, well-mated, very hungry eagles, and one stuffed eagle. Lupe was quoted: "Thees heegles--they eat and eat, now that damn mamma heegle, I hate her, for I theenk she get more and more fat and pretty soon poor Lupe she have little heegles all over the place, all eating rabbits and more round steak."

Hearts in Dixie. First of several Negro cinemas scheduled for imminent release, this picture has only one white actor in its cast--Richard Carlyle, who plays a doctor. Spirituals, nicely sung, occur, as advertised, 30 times in the hour and ten minutes Hearts in Dixie takes to run. The voodoo doings, the cotton pickings and Bible-shoutings are just what a certain class of people, educated to consider Negro life "colorful" and "primitive" expect of the race, just as people of another class expect vaudeville patter and tap-dancing. The pathos, based upon the low temperature of the ground enclosing somebody named Massa, is repetitious. All is redeemed, however, by the humor of a gaunt, pop-eyed blackamoor named Stepin Fetchit, cast as "Gummy," laziest of blackamoor husbands. The unpretentious story, genuinely moving at its best, at its worst a kind of Bostonian black-bottom, deals with an old Negro's denial and final acceptance of modern medical methods. Best shots--Gummy, whose feet hurt.

The Spieler (Pathe) is a tense picture of carnival life faithful to its background. From the time a crooked spieler goes to work for a girl-proprietor who is trying to run an honest show, the action moves ahead faster and faster through beautifully dovetailed sequences to a climax in which the spieler, armed with a tent stake, fights his way out of a battle with a mob of "rubes." Fred Kohler, Alan Hale, graceful Renee Adoree and a competent minor cast replace with simple, effective acting the sentimentality common to this type of picture. Best shot: the quiet, sinister mob jostling in the midway.

Lucky Boy (Tiffany-Stahl). George Jessel's clear, vigorous singing of three theme songs better than the average prevents his first sound-picture from being as tiresome as you would expect a picture to be in which 1) a night-club entertainer, getting a telegram telling of his mother's illness, sings a song entitled "My Mother's Eyes"; 2) a girl is saved from embarrassment in a matter concerning a jewel not given her by her husband; 3) the entertainer makes a hit on Broadway. Better advised on technique than narrative, Tiffany-Stahl, a comparatively small independent company, has overcome difficulties of sound-production which richer producers are still combating with less success.

The Girl on the Barge (Universal). A director with more interest in his material and with a better cast could have made a fine picture out of a hard-drinking, Scotch barge-captain's opposition to his daughter's romance with a deckhand. Indifferent, however, to life spun out in slow journeys up and down canals, or perhaps discouraged by Actress Sally O'Neill's coyness and Actor Malcolm MacGregor's self-possession, the producers of this picture combine mediocre photography with choppy storytelling. Worst shot: studio tank vexed by a wind-machine to indicate a whirlpool.

Underground (British Instructional Films, Ltd.) was written and directed by Anthony Asquith, 26, member of an English family which has already done much to entertain the U. S.* Few Asquiths, however, have used their wits as seriously as young Anthony in his account of a London subway guard who falls in love with what Britishers call a shopgirl. A plot, somewhat too complicated for strong drama, includes a rival lover who burns another girl to death against a high-tension switch, and a young wife who (married at last to her subway guard) rides around on the Underground just to be near him. In spite of amateurish handling of details (pulled punches in a fight; a fellow knocked into water coming up in dry clothes) Director Asquith gets across the savagery of city railroads.

Anthony Asquith, who was one of Oxford's most flagrant esthetes, called "Puffin," three years ago, went, last year, to Hollywood to study U. S. cinema technique. He was shown about by Douglas Fairbanks and Charles Chaplin. He is considered the best director in England today. His next film will be The Cottage at Darmoor.

*Anthony Asquith is the son of the late great Earl of Oxford and Asquith by his second wife, Margot Asquith. He has one sister, Princess Bibesco.