The New Pictures

Lilies of the Field (First National). Pretty Corinne Griffith talks through her nose in her first sound-picture, playing in a manner saturated with melancholy the role of a young woman who, innocently compromised, has been divorced by her husband. She goes to work as a dancer in a roof garden show and after a while becomes the mistress of the resort's richest habitue. All daring stuff when Miss Griffith made Lilies of the Field as a silent picture, the little plot seems mild enough now, and its denouement, in which the girl marries her lover, can be foreseen by the end of the first reel. Corinne Griffith's charm is the only thing that gets it over, but it is obvious at times that she is uneasy too, especially at the moment when she has to drop her habitual air of dignified seductiveness to dance a tap routine in tights on top of a piano. Best shot: a barber telling a child the story about the three bears.

Many cinema-seers insist that Corinne Griffith is the most beautiful woman in pictures. Fifty famed artists have painted her portrait in oils, her ankles are shapely, and her hands have been modeled by numerous sculptors. Her husband, producer Walter Morosco, uses a bronze mould of her left hand as a paper weight on his desk. Last week in Los Angeles she pleaded guilty to a charge that she had tried to evade paying-part of the tax on her 1927 income ($198,000) and was fined $1,000. She says that after she has made one more picture she will retire. "Why should I go on until I am playing mother roles? ... I have plenty of money. . . . I want to improve my mind. . . . Most of the time you will find me bobbing around Europe. . . ." White Cargo (British). Several U. S. picture companies wanted to produce this, but Will Hays, supervisor of cinema morals, made clear that he would not sanction it. With W. Somerset Maugham's Rain it was salient on his black list. At last United Artists made Rain with Gloria Swanson, calling it Sadie Thompson; Hays permitted its release, but when producers pointed to this precedent as an argument for letting them bring out White Cargo, even suggesting that it could be disguised under its original title, Hell's Playground, he stood firm. White Cargo, in his opinion, was worse than Rain, worse than anything. Thus the way was open for the W. P. Film Co. of London, which bought the talking picture rights and released their product here, apparently without opposition. Their White Cargo is an uninspired photograph of the stage play acted by a fair stock company. Early in its proceedings you realize with a shock that it was this play that brought the useful word "acclimatized" into the current argot. There is also, as the young Englishman, new to Africa, proceeds toward moral degeneration, frequent mention of "damp rot." Its novelty is gone, but White Cargo is still an effective piece of theatre, ironic in spite of its loquacity. Best shot: the Englishman whose undoing has been traced being carried out to the ship to be sent home while his successor, doomed for a similar fate, enters, ambitious and punctilious, in crisp white ducks.

Slightly Scarlet (Paramount). More than slightly foolish, this decorative melodrama of jewel thieves at work and play on the Riviera belongs to a comparatively new but increasingly comprehensive category of sound-cinemas. Its story is insipid and a lot of its talk ridiculous, but it it so well-made, its sets are so pretty, and its people so competent that within the scope of its intention it is hard to find fault with it. Even in its worst passages it provokes only that mild comfortable sort of boredom which is sometimes pleasanter than entertainment to people who want something to do between dinner and bed. There is a master criminal named Malatroff who classifies his subordinates by number, and is interested in procuring the Maharajah's ruby or a string of pearls from a Youngstown, Ohio, millionaire living at Nice. Evelyn Brent and Clive Brook are in it. Best shot: what Miss Brent found on her way to the safe.

A Lady to Love (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted--the play of the waitress from San Francisco who went to the country to marry a man she had never seen, who had proposed to her 'by mail-- was made into a silent picture in 1928, with Pola Negri. It was called then The Secret Hour. A Lady to Love is less sophisticated than The Secret Hour but it is splendidly acted and well cast. Vilma Banky is the waitress, Edward G. Robinson the man she marries, Robert Ames the handsome farm hand whose photograph was deceitfully enclosed in the letter of proposal his boss wrote to San Francisco. Best shot: wedding day on the ranch.

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