The New Pictures

The Thief of Bagdad. Going through miles and miles of glowing pictures in an art museum gets to be rather wearisome, unless someone is thrown out of the galleries. So boredom sets in eventually as Douglas Fairbanks takes one on a personally conducted tour of ancient Bagdad, without any really stirring grand larceny, although he plays a thief. It is like reading the Arabian Nights at one sitting, with only six minutes allowed to stretch the limbs and get the contrast of a workaday world.

The picture has the sheen of the romantic Orient all through it, and its sets of towering walls, labyrinthine streets and castles in the clouds are stupendously beautiful, expressive of dollars laid out in splendid designs. There are some stirring sights of the Mongols capturing the city like a swarm of beetles, and of Douglas raising an avenging horde from the earth with a magic powder more potent than aspirin. It is all a studied beauty, like a florid poster in action.

It is devoted to the proposition that if a cat may look at a king, a thief may win and woo a princess, with plenty of wizardry to help him. In the course of his fantastic quest, Douglas fights dragons, dives to the bottom of the sea, rides to the top of the sky on a winged Pegasus--always provocative of a crash applause. But except for the earlier part, he does not progress with his customary vim, being mostly content to sit on the horse and put his hands on his hips.

The chief fault with the picture is that Douglas is too real and virile to become a butterfly denizen of fairyland. Instead of achieving his ends by his own ingenuity, everything is done for him by magic, which dumps the theme of the story, that happiness must be earned. No hero who has all the cards stacked in his favor by necromancy seems particularly heroic. And here Douglas disappoints expectation by not rescuing the heroine personally, but as a whirling blur, formed by a cloak of invisibility.

Singer Jim McKee. William S. Hart is doubly iconoclastic in his latest picture of the great flannel shirted West. He does not use a gun, and is no longer a strong, silent man of the open spaces. He sings constantly--but his face seems preferable in the fixed repose of his earlier, poker-playing films. The story, which. deals with one man's sacrifices for the daughter of his dead pal which take him to prison, lacks the sanity of his previous works. There is an amazing collection of dumb animals in the picture.