New Pictures

The Callahans and the Murphys, saints be praised, are all of the same race. In the best tradition, Mrs. Murphy squabbles incessantly over the back fence with Mrs. Callahan. This is comical because their four children are inter-engaged and likely to be unapprised of the latest diplomatic conditions. Marie Dressier, who is said to contemplate retirement, acts Mrs. Callahan with Eclat.

The Prince of Head Waiters (Lewis Stone). The Parisian hero is torn from his newlywed U. S. bride, because her father, of haughty Boston ancestry, cannot tolerate a penniless artist in the family. Twenty years later the embittered man is a head waiter in a superior U. S. eating-place. While on duty, he has occasion to save a youth (Robert D. Agnew) from a blond siren of the "swell-restaurant" set. The youth turns out to be the head waiter's son. Thus Destiny led the man without hope to happy fulfillment. Crime & Punishment.* Dostoievsky wrote a grand and gloomy novel about a Russian youth who seeks salvation in rationality and finds it in faith. In the course of his anguished gropings he commits a brutal murder, falls in love with a gentle girl. Phoenix Film Co. of Germany has telescoped the story onto the screen with sincerity enough to preserve its hulk but without art enough to point its outlines. Ten Modern Commandments (Esther Ralston). Among modern young women, it appears, the ten modern commandments are all one: "Get your man." That much Kitten O'Day (Esther Ralston) accomplishes by marrying Tod Gilbert (Neil Hamilton), who has come all the way from Niagara Falls to make his fortune as a song writer in Manhattan, never realizing at first that "Broadway may seem on the level, but it's a steep grade when you try to make it." It is Kitten who pushes him up. Singed (Blanche Sweet). With her wealth, a dancing girl sets a bum up in the oil business. They both become millionaires, whereupon the man (Warner Baxter) comes down with acute social aspiration. San Francisco society, however, will never accept him as long as he associates with "that infamous Mrs. Wall." In the end he overcomes the society influenza and marries the woman, who certainly did right by him. Although film followers will recall that Blanche Sweet belongs to an early cinema epoch, she shows no signs of weakening.

*Last season, Crime & Punishment was given as a play entitled The Humble, in which Basil Sydney and Mary Ellis appeared.