The New Pictures

Welcome Danger (Paramount). Like all Harold Lloyd's comedies, this is built around a character fundamentally sensible and likable but who seems crazy because of some predominant trait or mania. Botany is the current mania and the character is a police chief's son who, asked to help out on the force because the present captain thinks he might be a chip off the old block, gets interested in fingerprints when he finds that they are like leaves-- no two alike. Lloyd took six months making Welcome Danger as a silent film, then made it over again putting in dialog where it fitted. All the big scenes are movement, and talk makes the shorter ones funnier, helps the action get started. The gags, like Lloyd's lecture on the petunia in the fingerprint studio, are meaningless when separated from the context but uproarious in it. Originally Welcome Danger was three hours long. Lloyd cut it himself at previews in a small town near Los Angeles, marking cuts whenever the audience stopped laughing. Best shots: Lloyd's account of his love-affair with a girl whose picture he obtained from a photomaton machine that functioned faultily; the fight with the dope ring; getting the police commissioner's fingerprint. The Devil's Pit (New Zealand). None of the many cameras searching out strange races of the world has ever caught one in the process of creating its legends, yet it is easy for people who have never seen any Maoris to believe that these in The Devil's Pit are not modern but ancient men. Producer Lew Collins took a year photographing them in New Zealand. Flabby Maoris desperately fight with sticks and spears, standing face to face in the Japanese manner, all because one chief's son has killed his rival for the hand of another's daughter. The story is simple enough to keep moving under its weight of rather dull local color--Maoris feasting and testing their strength, hurled down hillsides by battle, or sticking out their tongues and making faces while they dance. Best shot: reflection in water of the great pattern of trees in which the tribe clings, swinging as they "sing a good-bye song for tribesmen going away. Venus (United Artists ). No poet's goddess of pearl rising from the dark blue of an Aegean wave is Constance Talmadge, but a distracted flippant Venus left over from a past, an extravagantly rococo period of the cinema. Action of this silent picture hinges on a report, visibly confirmed, that Miss Talmadge has entertained a yachting party by riding nude on a surfboard off the island of Cyprus. When the captain of the yacht accidentally kills instead of merely reproving a nasty fellow who made remarks about her, Miss Talmadge discharges him. Later, finding out why he did it, she demonstrates effectively how sorry she feels about her mistake. The direction and acting are no better than the story but Algiers, Genoa and the Mediterranean are finely photographed. Typical shot: the Princess and the Captain meeting at the edge of the desert.

A Brooklyn woman had three daughters, Norma, Constance, Natalie. From a four-room cold-water apartment in Flatbush, two of them got in the movies and grew up acting. The third (Natalie) followed them at a distance and was married by a film funnyman. Buster Keaton. Norma succeeded quickly because she was a beautiful, ambitious girl, not restless or perhaps intelligent enough to have any desires that her work and her growing fame did not satisfy. Connie, younger and less poised than Norma, went to the studios every day and sometimes, with a small boy she met in a casting director's office, had fun imitating the actors waiting there for jobs. Director Ralph Ince noticed her and put her in a crowd in A Tale of Two Cities. Before long she got a better chance as a country girl in Griffith's Intolerance. While Norma, as the wife of Producer Joseph Schenck. was playing serious roles, Connie became the most popular of all screen comediennes, successful in Polly of the Follies, East is West, Dulcy, Her Sister from Paris, until by degrees, for no definite reason, she stopped working regularly. She seemed bored by pictures. She offered no explanation to her friends who pointed out that she had been divorced from her first two husbands -- one John Pialaglou, tobacco importer, and Capt. Alastair Macintosh, equerry of the Prince of Wales -- because she complained she could not be a wife and make pictures. Last spring when she married one Townsend Netcher, Chicago merchant, she said that she would never act again. Venus was made before her wedding. The Soul of France (French). What the War did to one French family is told here with a little romantic sentiment, a little propaganda, and a solid hour of battle action taken partly from war office records. No U. S. film has the first siege of Verdun as well as this, or the retreat from the Marne, or General Gallieni's taxicab army going out to save Paris.