The New Pictures

One Romantic Night (United Artists). This is Ferenc Molnar's The Swan, revised and softened, its crinkling wit ironed into conventional film dialog, its satire modified to focus attention on the romantic elements. Playwright Molnar was making deft fun of royalty in The Swan; in One Romantic Night Director Paul Stein is using royalty in its familiar stage function, as atmosphere. The result is only fair in spite of Lillian Gish's skill in making real the wistful, adolescent princess who loves a tutor and marries a prince. The trouble is that perhaps she never loved the tutor; such was the anxiety of the adapters to provide a happy ending that the spectator is left undecided. When handsome Conrad Nagel as the tutor drives away and Miss Gish elopes with Rod La Rocque, the entire cast seems satisfied. Best shot: a rustic politician reading his address of welcome to the visiting prince.

The Wonderful Lies of Nina Petrova (UFA). For the last year UFA has been making an obvious attempt to inject its product with box-office values imitated from Hollywood--an attempt which has not been very successful because the Hollywood patterns selected for imitation have all been a year or two old. The Wonderful Lies of Nina Petrova is a sombre melodrama about a young woman who leaves a Russian general to become the mistress of a lieutenant and who goes back to the general again to save her lover, a cheat at cards, from public disgrace. It is familiar material, unreal and overacted, but stamped with the European cachet of original direction and distinguished by the blonde beauty of Brigitte Helm. Best shot: the introductory sequence, repeated again at the end, in which the spectator follows the camera's eye through a villa apparently empty, through a room and a hallway, and at last to a balcony on which stands the tenant, Nina Petrova.

So This Is London (Fox). When Will Rogers is performing as an impediment in the insipid romance of his supposed son and a pretty English girl, and when, with his screen wife, he is giving a portrait of domestic felicity among the middleaged, his efforts to be engaging in a homely, honest way are strangely and uncharacteristically saccharine. Owen Davis is said to have written the dialog for this comedy, but most of its broadsides sound as if they had originated with Rogers himself. In a passport bureau: "No, I haven't got any witnesses to my birth. No, sir. You see, in the U. S. when somebody appears before us in person, we give him the benefit of the doubt, and take for granted that he was born. . . . My parents were Cherokee Indians. Of course, our people don't claim to have come over on the Mayflower or anything like that, but we met 'em at the dock when they landed."

Examining the interior of an English manor house: "Say, this must be one of those old Long Island places they've shipped over and put up over here. . . . What did she mean--'a run with the hounds'? Ain't they nobody to take the dogs out in this country? ... In the U. S. our deer hunters shoot each other so often we put red coats on them--so we can find them easier after they're dead. . . ."

Made before Rogers crossed the Atlantic to observe the Naval Conference, So This Is London contains no references to King George, the Prince of Wales or current diplomatic situations.

William Penn Adair Rogers was born in 1879 on the U. S. Cherokee Indian Territory. His grandmother and great grandmother were full-blooded Cherokee Indians.

He was a cowboy until 1905 when he went on tour with Col. Zachary Mulhall's Wild West Show. One night in Madison Square Garden a steer broke loose and jumped over the rails into the audience. Rogers roped it and was given so much publicity that he was booked in Keith's Union Square Theatre in an act of his own. Sitting on a pony in the middle of the stage he chewed gum, spun a rope, cracked jokes. Later, in the Follies, where he appeared without the pony, he chewed and drawled for 20 minutes his homely, immensely witty comments on current news.

From being a successful girl-show comedian, Rogers has become by degrees one of the most respected, syndicated, banquetted of U. S. humorists. Once he was named for Governor of Oklahoma but declined the nomination. He was Mayor of Beverly Hills, Calif., until a new state law made it a "city of the sixth class" and Rogers "mayor emeritus." President Wilson said that he found Rogers' remarks "not only humorous ... but illuminating." In 1919 he published his first book. The Cowboy Philosopher on the Peace Conference, which contains his famed quip: "It says in there [the Peace Covenant] 'There is to be no more wars.' And then there is a paragraph further down telling you where to get your ammunition in case there was one." Worth more than $2,000,000, he plays polo not badly, earns $750,000 per year.

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