The New Pictures

The Fighting Coward. There was once a light satire which Booth Tarkington wrote, and it was called Magnolia. This is it again, cinemized, burlesqued. Of course it is entirely improbable, but most funny things are. Whereas there was once a lily livered young butterfly chaser, whose hat was stamped on by a rude bully of a rival and Whereas he did not promptly strike that rival dead, he was therefore turned out of the swaggering little Southern town of Magnolia, therefore he Resolved to become a devil among the Mississippi gamblers. A pull at a trigger is to him then as a flick of his deft cambric handkerchief, he worsts that most delectable of all villains, Noah Beery, and returns to wipe his feet on the top piece of his rival. The whole is served in Southern style, with a beautiful, beautiful heroine, and dialogue in which there "ah no ahs." So once more Rhodemont is made ridiculous and everybody has a great laugh if he is feeling foolish.

Lilies of the Field took its title out of the Bible and its morals out of Omar Khayam. Again it is a play (of the same name) cinemized, but the maidenly morals of Hollywood stop the movie just short of the play. There is Corinne Griffith, playing an innocent wife, and then there is her rake of a husband. Naturally, under such circumstances it is the wife not the husband, who is caught in a compromising situation and ruthlessly divorced from husband and child. Then comes the handsome Conway Tearle, sweet and unmarried. He offers her an apartment--to test her. Suddenly she hears that her child is dead and accepts. But the child isn't dead; so she disaccepts. In his embarrassment the handsome Conway marries her. To accentuate the purity of everyone's morals, free-apartment ladies permeate the scene. In the play; the heroine herself became a free-apartment lady for a time. But in the movies, such a thing could not be; Will Hays forbids it.