The New Pictures

Hard to Get (First National). Although this mild anecdote about a mannequin who tries to see life as her customers see it has been told before in various forms, it has been directed lightly enough to avoid being offensive and even at times to be funny. When a handsome fellow in a long shiny car picks up Dorothy Mackaill she tells him she lives on Fifth Avenue and gives him the number of a house that as inevitably happens in these cases turns out to be his own. Hard to Get does not rise to any heights of originality in keeping Miss Mackaill from becoming mistress of this house but its photography is smart. Best shots: The Martin family at home.

The Royal Scandal (German). Nobody in the little Bavarian town had noticed Frau Jugo until her drawers fell down one day in front of a church. As a partial result of this event her husband inexplicably received a medal from the local prince. Although the comedy is at times heavy and overplayed, in the approved Teutonic manner, it is at other times genuinely funny. Best shots: how a Bavarian Babbitt behaves in his office.

The Careless Age (First National). Masked by the fatuous title--on the stage Diversion, a play by John Van Druten--is a compact and legitimately dramatic study of adolescent love. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. acts a young medical student, ambitious son of a London doctor, who on a holiday meets an experienced and beautiful woman of light fancy. Back in London she tires of her caprice, and his infatuation increases in direct ratio to her boredom until one night when he finds her with one of her other friends he goes temporarily crazy and strangles her. The irony of this denouement is softened by having the woman recover, the young lover turn back to his former fiancee and the career he had forgotten, but in spite of its compromises The Careless Age remains a better picture than most. Best shot: nerve-treatment in a hotel.

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was born in 1907 to his father's first wife, Anna Beth Sully, daughter of a soapmaker. He went to various schools in Paris and London, learned to talk good French and heard enough Englishmen talk to fabricate with fair success the English accent he uses in The Careless Age. Partly because his father did not want him to be an actor, he studied sculpture and painting for a while and, like most expensively educated young men, wrote some poetry that was never published. He worked in a few pictures as an extra and showed so much ability that his father's objections to having him in the business gradually lost force. He wrote the titles for The Black Pirate, The Gaucho, and Two Lovers; he became interested in technicolor, probably the only subject of the many so casually learned on which he is recognized as a specialist. He is a fairly good athlete, taller and heavier than he looks in his pictures; in spite of his size he wants to make a cinema of Rostand's L'Aiglon, playing the little prince. After being engaged for two years to Joan Crawford, whom his father and stepmother, Mary Pickford, were rumored not to like much, he married her last spring in Manhattan. Some of his pictures : A Woman of Affairs, The Barker, Fast Life.