The New Pictures

I Am Suzanne (Fox), is the third U. S. film made by Lilian Harvey, small, slim English-born actress who made her reputation in a German film, Congress Dances. Like most of Jesse L. Lasky's productions for Fox, it is aimed at what Hollywood calls "class" audiences. Partly a masterpiece and partly a mess, I Am Suzanne is unique among this season's musical pictures because it strives for satiric fantasy instead of a high-priced combination of pornography and farce. Its most important actors are not humans but the Piccoli puppets (TIME, Jan. 22).

When Suzanne (Lilian Harvey) breaks a leg dancing, her rascally stage manager loses all interest in her welfare. A group of puppeteers take care of her and the scion (Gene Raymond) of the chief puppeteer falls in love with her. The rest of I Am Suzanne deals with Suzanne's uneasy feeling that Tony is really in love not with her but with a puppet portrait he has made of her. The mocking dances of his marionettes and her fiance's dreamy affinity with them first confuse, then anger her. When her leg has mended enough for her to dance again, she shoots the tiny effigy of Suzanne through the heart. Finally it appears that Tony prefers the real Suzanne to the one that works on strings.

The charm of I Am Suzanne lies in the way it tells a light love story and at the same time gently parodies it. Where the mood of the picture collapses is in such scenes as the one showing the puppet of Suzanne turning ridiculously into the real Suzanne on the stage of a theatre, the one of a heavy-handed adagio dance in which pretty little Lilian Harvey is tossed about like a beanbag by chorus boys. Good sequence: Suzanne's night mare, when she is dozing in her theatre dressing room, of her trial for murder by a court of furious, scornful puppets.

Miss Fane's Baby is Stolen (Paramount). Taken from a story by Rupert Hughes, this picture harks back to the Lindbergh kidnapping. Miss Fane (Dorothea Wieck) is a widowed cinemactress wrapped up in her child (Baby LeRoy). Agonized when she finds him missing from his crib, she refrains for a time from telling the police. She arranges a rendezvous with the kidnappers but they are frightened off by the appearance of some casual motorcyclists. Miss Fane appeals for help by press and radio, even talks through amplifiers while flying over the length & breadth of California. Her words are heard by a hearty, featherbrained shack-dweller (Alice Brady) who grows suspicious of some mean-looking people who have moved in nearby with a baby. She sells them milk, gabbles at them. They are on the verge of killing the baby when the shack woman snatches it away, eludes their shots, escapes in a battered auto mobile to return the child to its mother.

A topical film which draws tears with out half trying.

Miss Fane's Baby is Stolen is notable for expert work by Alice Brady and by Jack LaRue who plays the smallest, meanest and most jittery of the kidnappers.

Heavy-lidded Jack LaRue wants some day to play Armand to somebody's Camille. To date his fame rests upon his performance of the low, sinister gangster that George Raft refused to play in The Story of Temple Drake. Born of Italo-English parents in New York, he was once a piano-tuner, then a stage actor. In Diamond Lil he was Mae West's lover. When he went to Hollywood two years ago his work as a young priest in A Farewell to Arms earned him a Paramount contract. Adept at delineating despicable fellows, Jack LaRue appears next in Good Dame, with Sylvia. Sidney and Fredric March.

Massacre (First National) is an Indian picture but not of the tomahawk & wampum variety. Adapted from a novel by Robert Gessner, it adds up into an indignant crusade against the white man's treatment of the red. Joe Thunder Horse (Richard Barthelmess) is a brash young college man who has been away from his tribe's reservation for years. Performing in a rodeo in Chicago, he learns his father is dying. Joe returns to find the reservation in the grasp of as rascally a Federal agent (Dudley Digges) as ever split fees and doctored his books. Atavistically, Joe falls in love with a beauteous Indian (Ann Dvorak). He thrashes a dope-riddled doctor whose negligence caused his father's death. When a burly, grafting undertaker (Sidney Toler) rapes Joe's 15-year-old sister, Joe pursues him in an automobile, lassos him, drags him by a rope until he is all but dead. Disgusted by the unctuousness of a Christian missionary, Joe induces his family and friends to bury his father with old pagan rites. Such primitive behavior lands Joe in jail from which he escapes and makes his way to Washington.

There a Senate committee hears his story but adjourns when the undertaker dies and Joe is indicted for murder. Back on the reservation it takes an Indian uprising and some bold work by Joe's friends' to insure his fair trial and acquittal. In the end it is suggested that the Great White Father in Washington may bring the Indians better times. Looking as much like a young Sioux as any 38-year-old white man may. Barthelmess gives a sincere, straight-faced performance.

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