The New Pictures

Puttin' on the Ritz (United Artists). This is a highly conventional film musical comedy, but so well produced and ably cast that if its lines and situations were new it would be the year's best picture of its kind. Irving Berlin's tunes, and such smart players as Joan Bennett, James Gleason, Aileen Pringle, and Lilyan Tashman are arranged in support of Harry Richman, Manhattan night-club entertainer, who has never made a picture before and who is suspected of having negotiated his engagement to Actress Clara Bow to make the cinema public curious to see him. The story concerns a song-plugger who forgot his old friends in the hour of success and subsequently went blind drinking bad booze. At the end there is a suggestion that the blindness will not be permanent. Most important in the picture are the songs, and the best of them, soon to be heard from the loudspeaker in the transom of many a radio and phonograph store, are "Puttin' on the Ritz," "Vagabond Song," and "With You." Best shot: the Alice in Wonderland sequence.

Dangerous Paradise (Paramount). In the masthead of this film the producers announce that it is "based on incidents from a novel by Joseph Conrad," a guarded statement obviously intended to divert the criticism which, based on incidents from Dangerous Paradise, would be leveled at them if they admitted that the novel was the famous Victory. As a matter of fact the picture is no more unfaithful to its material than other, franker attempts to make scenarios out of Conrad's books. The adventurous and fantastic shell of the story has been preserved; the thought that burned behind Conrad's carved phrases and balanced sentences like light behind a stained glass window, making the queer figures in the glass live after a fashion, is gone. Nancy Carroll is a girl who plays the violin and sings in Zangiacomo's Ladies' Orchestra in a South Sea island hotel run by a man named Schomberg. Richard Arlen helps 'her to escape from disgusting fates imminent for her on every side. The sordid background Conrad had in his mind, a background in which, at the world's outposts, civilized formulas are stretched so thin that they become a satiric mirror for human behavior, has been changed into decorative and often admirable picture postcards. Best shot: Schomberg throwing the band leader downstairs.

Anna Christie (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). The combination of Greta Garbo's acting with one of Eugene O'Neill's best plays is not entirely satisfactory, but blame for the lost opportunity does not fall on either Garbo or O'Neill. In spite of a certain proportion of bunkum in its composition, Antia Christie is good stuff, vivid and well-constructed, with real people in it, and Garbo, as the Swedish girl who blames her luckless past on her father's neglect, is perfectly cast. One reason why this talkie is inferior to the wonderful silent picture made from the play six years ago is that the producers have apparently tried to turn it out too cheaply. Another reason is that it is stupidly directed. Every bone of the play's framework--skeleton that should be smoothed and hidden away under the flesh of character and detail--is carefully stressed in the important scenes in which Anna and her father and her lover are before the camera at the same time; the two men face each other at a table and Anna sits or stands between them, stressing the triangle; when Old Man Christie vents his periodic curse on the Ole Davil Sea he usually goes and looks out at the sea, and shakes his fist at it. Anna Christie remains Greta Garbo's picture--a superb individual performance. Her voice is deep and flexible, and her Swedish accent fits naturally into the part. Best shot: Garbo telling why she cannot marry the Irishman.

Exhibitors' Herald World took a poll of nationwide cinema proprietors to de termine the most popular U. S. cinemactress in 1929. First five in order: Bow, Moore, Carroll, Crawford, Garbo, who scored fifth although she had made but one sound-synchronized picture, no talking pictures, had appeared less frequently than her rivals. That the Garbo popularity is increasing is attested by the fact that in 1928 she failed to be among the five lead ers -- Bow, Moore, Dove, Daniels, Del Rio.

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