The New Pictures

Forgotten Faces. She is sitting at a piano, playing idly. Suddenly, she stops; curls her fingers, tigress-like. There is a man standing near her. She seizes him, pulls him down on her lap, bites the back of his neck, twists a handful of his hair. Then she stands up, arches her spine, leads the man into a bedroom.

Her name is Olga Baklanova; her address is c/o Paramount-Famous-Players-Lasky Corp., Hollywood, Calif. Compared with her, Theda Bara and the oldtime cinema-bad-women were fudge-makers. She was born in Russia and first achieved fame in the Moscow Art Theatre. Morris Guest, shrewd, brought her to the U. S. She played the nun in the road show of The Miracle. Then the movies got her. In The Street of Sin, The Man Who Laughs and her present triumph, Forgotten Faces, she demonstrates that she is, far and away, the most voluptuous cinemactress.

The story of Forgotten Faces was written by Richard Washburn Child, onetime (1921-24) U. S. Ambassador to Italy, and by Oliver Hazard Perry Garrett, onetime crack reporter on the New York World. The above seduction scene causes a gentleman crook named Heliotrope Harry (Clive Brook) to kill the man in the bedroom and have nothing more to do with the woman, his wife. He goes to jail for murder, is released years later. His major problem is to keep his grown-up daughter away from the evil influence of his wife. Success crowns his efforts when both he and his wife are killed in an absurd climax.

Miss Baklanova goes from pianos to milk bottles and straight gin with convincing ease. The film is superbly directed.

The Perfect Crime. "The greatest detective in the world" (Clive Brook) retires because criminals are so stupid. He will show them how; he commits "the perfect crime," a murder without a single clew. But finally, he is forced to confess in order to save the life of an innocent man. It is a thoroughly insipid film. To critical audiences, the crime was by no means perfect. The acting of Clive Brook and Irene Rich was exasperating. The "talkie" parts were atrocious, partly faked.*

The Mysterious Lady. They say that Greta Garbo once went to see one of her own films and has never done so again. The reason: she was sickened by the long and langorous close-ups which delight cinemaddicts. There are plenty of such close-ups in The Mysterious Lady. But otherwise. Miss Garbo gives a dignified and stirring performance as Russia's greatest pre-War lady spy. The man in the case (Conrad Nagel) fails to click.

* The actor moves his lips while a person off stage talks into the recording device.