The New Pictures

Strong Boy (Fox). Full-length, light films which substitute character comedy for slapstick, and homely atmosphere for romantic, amuse and charm adult audiences but rarely do well at the boxoffice. John Ford, who directed Four Sons and The Iron Horse, has now had a lot of fun showing how a muscle-bound baggage smasher carved his way in the world. To Smasher Victor McLaglen's girl, "promotion" meant a white collar; to Smasher McLaglen it meant a job he liked. Told to pick his own job after he kept a trunk from falling on the daughter of a railroad director, he chose to superintend the Lost & Found Department. Saving the Queen of Lisonia's jewels from train robbers, he was told again to pick his job. He became a fireman. Best shot of this smart film-- Strong Boy and the lost child.

Wild Orchids (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). The increasing sophistication of the picture business is well demonstrated by this story of a foreign prince, a U. S. millionaire, a lady, and a tiger, which has been told before but never so effectively. In the 1914 manner of the cinema, it was a story of marital infidelity as crude and tawdry as its papier-mache settings. As done in the 1919 epoch, it was a heavy-footed charade, overburdened with its setting. Now, a vehicle for Greta Garbo's disturbing shadow, it moves lightly, even wittily, and the lady's momentary struggle between her husband's coldness and the impetuosity of the prince takes place against a new and interesting background, handled with laudable control--the tea-plantations of Java. Lewis Stone's urbanity, is rewarded by his wife's decision to stay with him after all, following an episode in which Stone holds the amorous Nils Asther against a tree at the point of his double-barreled tiger-rifle, while a real, terrifying tiger snarls toward the sound-device. Best shot--Greta Garbo drying her feet.

Christina (Fox). Janet Gaynor is the first picture actress to suggest convincingly real, virginal youth. Her beautiful and delicate charm, made famous in Seventh Heaven, is now set to work in a pretty, painstaking, and rather inane film about a Dutch girl who falls in love with a circus performer, and, after difficulties, is united to him. Best shots--the Dutch village.

The Wild Party (Paramount). In one of those colleges where all the girls are good-looking, talk musical comedy English, make love instead of study, and wear clothes that must have cost their parents a pretty penny, Clara Bow falls in love with a professor. Warner Fabian wrote the plot and John V. A. Weaver the drawling dialog of a story that has no connection with the verses by the same title published last year by Joseph Moncure Marsh. The sound-device, recording the Bow voice for the first time, sometimes lags behind, sometimes careers ahead of episodes which arraign young irresponsibility for the purpose of illustrating it and which are not kept from being tedious by their waggish, unjustified affectation of daring. Best shot--Joyce Compton as a tattletale.

Born in Brooklyn of English, Scottish, French and other extractions, Clara Bow had achieved a development of 5 ft. 2 1/2 in., 109 Ibs., with red hair and brown eyes, when her career first took shape. Winning a magazine beauty contest in 1922 procured for her a silver cup, an evening gown, a screen contract. But she looked so ugly when tears streaked her makeup, that Director Cabanne cut her efforts out of Beyond the Horizon. Discouraged, Miss Bow was learning stenography when another director offered her a part. Since then her energy, rolling eyes, bad manners and good figure, exercised in more than 40 pictures, have in some mysterious way made her famous as the cinema's greatest exponent of sex appeal. Some of her films: Kiss Me Again, Free to Love, My Lady's Lips, Eve's Lover, This Woman, The Primrose Path, Daughters of Pleasure, Two Can Play, The Adventurous Sex, My Lady of Whims, Helen's Babies, Great Sensation, It, Get Your Man, The Fleet's In and Three Weekends.

The Godless Girl (Pathe). With a haphazard, melodramatic fanaticism, Cecil De Mille has directed an old-fashioned tract about what happens to students who don't believe in God, about what goes on in reformatories, about deprivation, vileness, atheism. Most savage shots--Noah Beery as the red-eyed reformatory guard.