The New Pictures

Marianne (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). One of the most lamentable consequences of the singing pictures is Marion Davies. Here she is as a French girl in love with Stagg* of the A. E. F. One of the ablest clowns in the cinema she is forced to be sentimental. A skillful pantomimic, she has to talk continually, even sing. Unalterably Irish-American she wears peasant clothes and expresses herself in a language consisting of U. S. baby-talk combined with the foreign word cheri. A French soldier who has gone blind is the dramatic obstruction in her affair with Stagg. Best shot: Marion Davies entertaining a base camp with imitations of Maurice Chevalier, Gloria Swanson, Sarah Bernhardt.

A Most Immoral Lady (First National). The duplicity of wives who lure rich men into compromising situations so that their husbands can collect money from them has long been familiar to theatre audiences. It is less common in the cinema. The hints that before long Leatrice Joy will fall in love with one of her dupes even keep her from being as boring as her stolid acting usually makes her. Changing A Most Immoral Lady into a picture has slowed its tempo and made even more insubstantial its faint flourishes of wit. As though recognizing this the producers have dressed it up with some expensive sets and a little indifferent singing. Silliest shot: rich codger telling Miss Joy why he admires her.

The Return of Sherlock Holmes (Paramount). When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was writing the stories that became the basis of modern detective fiction, he clearly attached no importance to frightening people and wasted no time on realism. What kept him writing was his naive pleasure in being mysterious. Director Basil Dean has retained Doyle's point of view wonderfully well, so that instead of an overwrought modern thriller The Return of Sherlock Holmes is good fun. Obviously relishing his role as the author relished his mysteries, Clive Brook, wearing sideburns, in a woolen hat and old-fashioned loungesuits, knows just how to handle the Sherlockian pipe, as crooked and heavy as a revolver.

On the trail of international wiretappers, murderers, kidnappers, he gumshoes in many disguises along the corridors of the fastest ocean liner afloat. Adroitly he deals with dictaphones, fake wireless messages, the poisoned needle springing from the clasp of a cigaret box. When at last the Master Criminal lies dead and the fiance of the daughter of his old friend is restored to society, he punctuates with a tap of his pipe the famed, "Eleementary, Watson, eleementary." Best shot: dinner 'for two in the arch-fiend's cabin.

Frozen Justice (Fox). Melodramas like this, arranged against backgrounds of snow and wintry seas, have been fine vehicles for that smart dog, Rin Tin Tin. Lenore Ulric is nicer to look at than

Rin Tin Tin, but it would be hard to find a story that made less use of her talents. After a white trader has persuaded her to run away from her Eskimo husband she sings for a while in a ginmill in Nome, Alaska. The girls in the ginmill pick the customers' pockets but speak with horror of a friend of theirs caught smoking. They dislike Ulric because she is a half-caste trying to push her way "to white man's country, where Talu's white blood forever calls her." The local color weighing down Frozen Justice is interesting in the ginmill. Ulric's beautiful figure and husky voice go over well, but the situations are trite and the denouement in a frozen canyon fails to be tragic because it is not inevitable. Best shot: Ulric's singing "The Right Kind of Man."

Like many a young woman now earning a good living in the show business, Lenore Ulric never had much luck until she went to work for David Belasco. Her father was a steward in an army hospital in Milwaukee. She was born in New Ulm, Minn. She ran away from the 5th grade to be a cigaret girl in a stock-company Carmen. She told Belasco where she had played--Chicago, Grand Rapids, Schenectady. She had walked into the Belasco Theatre in Manhattan early one morning, answering an advertisement for supers. She looked tired and sick but she managed to learn what she had to do quicker than the dozen girls hired with her. Belasco took her out of the cast and sent her home to rest up, continued to pay her salary. He gave her lessons for a season and in 1916 put her in a big part in The Heart of Wetona. Working for him during the next twelve years she spent much of her time putting walnut stain on those portions of her person not covered by beads, grass, buckskin or the negroid type of evening gown. She gets up at noon and eats two meals a day with lemons between meals for the sake of her throat. She was good in Tiger Rose, Lulu Belle, The Sun-Daughter, Kiki, The Harem, and Mima. This is her first picture.

*The hero's name was Flagg in the pattern drama for all such diversions (What Price Glory).