The New Pictures

Fashions in Love (Paramount). Like all plays good enough to be imitated but not good enough to be classics, The Concert by Herman Bahr, presented long ago on the legitimate stage by Leo Ditrichstein, has been discredited by inept adaptations of some of its best effects. Fashions in Love is the screen name for The Concert. By any name it remains a very good farce. It is concerned with the marital infidelities of an elderly and temperamental pianist whose wife gets him back by the not wholly startling method of pretending to be in love with the husband of the blonde he has taken to the mountains. Adolphe Menjou, who talks throughout the picture with a French accent, although in private life his inflection is thoroughly native, makes a suave, satiric portrait out of the role. Best shot: Menjou. exhausted by exercise and mountain air, thumping with his cane on the bedroom door of his inamorata and uttering protests of passion while he eats a sandwich.

Behind That Curtain (Fox). This melodrama about a girl of the British peerage who marries a peer murderer and runs away from him with a peer explorer is told partly in pictures but principally in words English, French, Hindu, Indian, Chinese. It is played by an orchestra, on reeds, on drums and a solo saxophone. It shows settings of the Khyber Pass, London, San Francisco, the Sudanese desert. It records the whirr of airplane propellers and another noise which sounds a good deal the same but is only camel-neighing. It contains love scenes, whiskey-drinking, and such lines as ''We are two dots in the loneliness" and "The night by the oasis when I read in your eyes." The cast, especially Gilbert Emery as one of those film detectives who combine social welfare work with their profession, and Lois Moran, act and talk competently and at times with distinction. Somehow they subdue the silliness of their material enough to make it distantly credible. The scenarist has retained continuity in spite of the propensity which the villain shares with the hero of traveling amazing distances for very little reason. Silliest shot: love among the camels.