The New Pictures

Luther (Cob-Film). The German producers who made this compressed biography of Protestant Martin Luther had to be careful. They could not make him out an inspired and righteous prophet or Roman Catholics might stay away. They could not, on the other hand, suggest as some theologians have, that Luther was an oversensitive but not overintelligent monk, stimulated by the dirty church politics of his time into a rebellion which became increasingly fanatic as it became increasingly personal. Their real job was to consider that Luther had no reputation one way or the other. If they had shown him, a stubborn, roundheaded little man, going about "his business in a country and a period where certain conditions existed, they could not have failed to suggest, by his reactions to those conditions, what sort of a fellow he was, and what sort of struggles went on in his mind. This might have been a great picture.

More objectively treated, it would have been great. Reverence weighs it down and makes it dull. The characters act pompously, as though never forgetting for a second that the things they are doing are described in all history books. Routine shots: Eugene Kloepfer as Luther writing his theses against indulgences--arguing before the Diet at Worms. Two Weeks Off (First National). Without being particularly original or ambitious, this account of Dorothy Mackaill's affection for a plumber masquerading as a famed actor has a nice flavor. More than half of it is silent, and the long stretches of agreeable, unlikely comic action, punctuated with subtitles, remind you how well the movies used to get along without the sound device. Plumber Jack Mulhall is proud of being a plumber; his theatrical personality is thrust on him by the imaginative girls he meets at Bradley Beach. Best shot: Mulhall showing he is an actor by reciting "The Shooting of Dan McGrew." The Wheel of Life (Paramount). To appear in this film Richard Dix, usually properly shaved, grew one of those brief mustaches which indicate to the cinema public that its wearer is a British officer. While he is buying her something to eat in the delicatessen next door, a veiled young woman in evening dress runs away from his apartment. Her action suggests ingratitude, for a few moments before Dix had kept her from committing suicide by jumping off London Bridge. In India later she is the blonde wife of a Colonel so elderly and so gallant that when faced with the temptation of cuckolding him, an officer who comes from the right school will ask for a transfer. A playwright who comes from the right school will then get the woman into danger. In the besieged Buddhist monastery Esther Ralston and Dix kiss while tribesmen's 'bullets spatter around them. At intervals they speak with as much conviction as they can bombastic lines shopworn 'by ten years of theatrical use. Miss Ralston is beautiful and a good actress. Dix is handsome but doesn't fit his part. Silliest shot: a horrible painting of the late Lord Kitchener indicated as a suggestion for transmitting Kitchener's stencil "Carry on" to Actress Ralston after her attempted jump. Like many contemporary film people, Esther Ralston took her first part as a stage baby. She and her parents, May Howard and Henry Walter Ralston, were routed over vaudeville circuits as "The Ralston Family, Metropolitan Entertainers." She went to school in Washington and New York, was tutored during the busy seasons. When she first got in pictures she was a free lance, that is, she made pictures without a permanent contract, hired sometimes by the week and sometimes under a blanket salary for a piece of work in a film that was being made. From being an extra she worked up to character parts. She had been a free lance for seven years when Paramount signed her. She did more character parts, then she was featured in a college story, finally starred in a succession of shoddy program pictures. Last fall von Sternberg directed her in The Case of Lena Smith, one of the year's best pictures. Now she has been demoted to doing "featured" parts again. She is 5 feet 5? inches tall, weighs 124 pounds, is not stupid.