The New Pictures

Take Me Home. When a comedy is weak there are three things a director can do to make it better: 1) keep the star changing her costumes; 2) have her fall down a lot; 3) hire a funny subtitle writer. In this routine picture of a chorus girl in love with a country boy, Bebe Daniels gets no mud on her clothes although all other devices for bolstering the plot are liberally used. Onetime chorine Lilyan Tashman, as the musical comedy star who leads Rube Neil Hamilton to her Fifth Avenue house, acts better than Miss Daniels.

The Home Towners. George M. Cohan believes himself to be the author of this story about a suspicious old man who comes to New York from South Bend, Ind., to be best man for a friend who is marrying a woman they wouldn't like in South Bend. While the camera turns its solemn eye and ear on the declamations and gestures of Richard Bennett and Doris Kenyon, the spectators, distracted by the jerky sequences, annoyed by the enormous metallic voices issuing from the vitaphone, are left to wonder what sounds even a perfected mechanism could produce which would equal the beautiful silence of oldfashioned cinemas.

Me, Gangster is the autobiography of a gangster adapted from a serial in the Saturday Evening Post. Beer-drinking as a baby, sneak-thieving as a schoolboy, pool-playing, loafing, robbing, killing--such things, say numerous subtitles, land young men in the jug. In spite of the monotonous effort of the script to point a moral. Director Raoul Walsh has made this rather gentle document of crook life effective by little niceties--the ward-heeler spitting in the hand, extended for a friendly shake, of the gangster who taught his son bad ways; the prisoner in the visiting room who wants to pass a bar of chocolate to his baby.

Varsity. After years of rah-rah pictures, of sporting seniors in plaid pants with suites at the Ritz, of the prom girl, the fresh freshman, of cabalistic tortures in the basement of the Delta Nu house. of winning the game for dear old Dearold. comes a college picture in which real college boys, bedrooms, dining halls and bleachers are photographed, and as an accompaniment to which an authentic Princeton locomotive and the song "One Keg of Beer for the Four of Us," sung by authentic Princeton undergraduates, is recorded on a sound device.

Wells Root (Yale 1922), onetime theatre critic for TIME, wrote this cinema of the adventure of the son of a janitor and a girl from a Wild West show in the shadow of Holder Tower. Frank Wright Tuttle (Yale 1915) directed it. Like loyal sons of Eli, the author and director asked permission to shoot the college scenes on their own campus but were turned down by New Haven authorities, annoyed by the many unauthorized pictures which have shown Yale men as debauchees.

Curly-haired Buddy Rogers is a janitor's son. He does not know this because when his mother died the county supervisors refused to trust his rearing to his drunken father and put him in an orphanage. Years have passed and the father, sober enough now to hold the job he has gotten in a Princeton dormitory, gets word that his son has been given the thousand dollars he has sent and will arrive to enter Princeton about the same time as the letter. He is advised not to reveal his identity.

Chester Conklin as the janitor, with a duster sticking out of his pocket, is convincing, even moving at times, in a difficult role. The problems of his son, who gets drunk the first time he tastes liquor, as most lads do, and afterwards shoots up a wild west act in a neighboring carnival and falls in love with a girl in a sombrero, come to a climax in a struggle with the bad members of the wild west troupe.