The New Pictures

The Valiant (Fox). Sentimentality laid many traps for the murderer who wanted to die without letting people know his real name. There might have been heroics in the courtroom, and later, when his mother saw his picture in the paper and sent his sister to find out if this was her boy, everything might have collapsed in glycerine tears; the murder, perhaps, might have been explained as something necessary, even honorable. But, somehow, Director William K. Howard and Actor Paul Muni, formerly known as Muni Weisenfreund, overcame their difficulties by wise elimination of detail and a powerful dramatic reticence that make the picture one of the best of the year. Best shot: the interview between Muni and his sister in the death house.

Eternal Love (United Artists). The Alps and Director Ernst Lubitsch's talent for spectacles wall in a dull, conventional plot about a mountaineer who got two girls but liked only one. Up and down mountains the little story wanders like a lost chasseur, until it is swallowed up in one of numberless snowstorms sweeping past John Barrymore's profile. The picture is silent. Best shot: the avalanche.

Gentlemen of the Press (Paramount). An indefinite number of collaborators, all newspapermen, wrote this account of a rewrite man's hard luck. As a stageplay, it was successful. As cinema, it suffers more definitely from the faults which affect all stories about generalities instead of about characters. As a result, the reporter who is too busy for eight years to go home--too busy to get to the bedside of his dying daughter--but not too busy to get mixed up with sleek-headed, slow-voiced Katherine Francis--is a synthetic fellow whose reality is compromised by the difficulty of making him a type. Best shot: Walter Huston showing how to get rid of a woman.

The Pagan (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). When W. S. Van Dyke went to Tahiti to produce White Shadows in the South Seas, it took him a week to make a rubbish-strewn Pacific beach as clean as the scenario prescribed. The same beach, or one like it, served him as the setting for this new picture, which is almost as pretty as the first. The same problems are indolently offered and solved in a way that people find agreeable on summer nights. For here a wise and graceful half-caste youth whose life is spent lying in the sun, making love, swimming, and occasionally singing in an operatic manner a tune called "The Pagan Love Song," triumphs over an energetic moralist who has come South to make things better. Best shot: Ramon Novarro stealing Dorothy Jam's away from the church two minutes after she has married Villain Donald Crisp.

Like most Mexicans in the U. S., Ramon Gil Samenyego once worked as a busboy and is said to be descended from an Aztec queen and a conquistador. Rex Ingram christened him Novarro, which was afterward legalized as his middle name. When a revolution ruined his family he toured for a season with a ballet troupe, then worked as an extra until Ingram cast him as Rupert in The Prisoner of Zenda. He lives in Los Angeles with his mother and some of his 14 brothers and sisters, does not own a car, never goes to picture premieres, takes voice and piano lessons, fences, takes sunbaths, and occasionally gives concerts for his friends in his private theatre. He once offered Edison Phonograph Co. an option on his voice for the loan of $10,000; ten years later he refused to make records for them because he did not think his voice was ready. Next week he will make his debut with a Berlin opera company as Mario in Tosca.