The New Pictures

Pied Piper Malone. Booth Tarkington pulled up his chair and wrote this play expressly for Thomas Meighan. When the last foot of film had flickered it was obvious that he had not done a first class job. Smartly titled and perfectly hygienic, it is unsatisfactory as mature entertainment. The hero is a New England villager whose personality has attracted the idolatry of the entire juvenile population.

Fashion Row. By a clever manipulation of wigs, Mae Murray contrives to do a successful sister act. As her older sister, she is a Russian immigrant in New York who rises to the brilliant dignity of a star in the local theatrical firmament and marries into a Mayflower family. All this under the pretense that she is a princess. Discarding the black wig and the tragedy manner, she again arrives in New York-- this time as her younger sister-- wide-eyed and penniless. On the same boat is an oily anarchist who discovers the interlocking relationships, gets them all together in an East Side furnished room for a good fight.

About a reel of utterly worthless material should be excised and quietly thrown away. Remaining would be a smartly dressed melodrama, with Miss Murray acting a good deal better than usual in a decidedly interesting part.

Flaming Barriers seems a notable attempt at leisurely comedy which misses fire. It misses fire until the last few hundred feet, when a forest conflagration banishes the leisurely plot and burns the whole thing in a blaze of melodrama. The fire enables Jacqueline Logan and Antonio Moreno to prove her father's fire-fighting apparatus the most efficient in the world. Since everyone but the villain had been trying to prove this throughout the picture, it was the normal solution. The earlier stages of the action, dealing with life in a Main Street Manufacturing Company, are only mildly arousing. Miss Logan is still one of the prettiest in all the cinema seraglio.

Painted People. Colleen Moore has collected for herself so much reputation that her managers, forgetting themselves entirely, let her loose with a surpassingly stupid scenario. It is probable that Miss Moore will know better next time. From the theatre pit she can see herself as others see her--striving desperately with impossible material, and by no means mak-ing a go of it.