The New Pictures

Coquette (United Artists). In this dialog adaptation of an immensely successful stage play, Mary Pickford was faced with certain difficulties. The girl in the play is 18. Mary Pickford is known to be 36 and generally believed to be 39. The girl in-the play, emotionally mature, is a-passionate, complex personality. Mary Pickford has-created most of her reputation playing girls whose naivete was proved as thoroughly by their, actions-as by their wide-open blue eyes and the ringlets which hung, symbols of virginity, on their thin shoulders. On the stage, able young Actress Helen Hayes set a high standard of vocal expression in reading the lines. Mary Pickford has not performed vocally, for many a year. Her script was hurt when its sex morality was .cut over for film use and a windy, incredible courtroom scene introduced'. Her cast is bad and her director no genius'. But somehow, as-- though to prove to the world which has called her "America's Sweetheart" that her talent does not share the tawdriness of the phrase, she turns her difficulties to assets, brings vividly to life the southern smalltown coquette who liked one fellow too well to suit her father. Best shot of any talking picture to date -- Mary Pickford telling a lawyer what she thinks of her father after he has shot and fatally wounded her lover. In 1897, Mrs. John Charles Smith, a widow, ran a candy counter in a fish store in Toronto. Getting a job, later, with a stock company, she took her five-year-old daughter, Gladys, to the theatre because, she couldn't leave her at home. When Gladys was five she had a part in which she spoke one line: "Don't speak to her, girls. Her father killed a man." She had played many melodramas before her mother adopted Pickford, her immigrant grandmother's maiden, name, as the family surname and altered Gladys to "Mary." In 1909, D. W. Griffith was looking for someone to play Pippa in Pippa Passes when, having interviewed Mary Pickford, he said, "That girl would be a pip as Pippa." From $40 per week in one-reel Biograph features, she advanced, first under Griffith, then with other companies, to $2,000 a week in 1915, when she was called the highest salaried woman in the world. Now, married to Douglas Fairbanks, she makes .over $1,000,000 per annum and makes special trips to Washington about her income tax. Shrewd, energetic, an able organizer, she keeps her husband's accounts, is the director of a bank and of several business corporations, collects signatures, likes-to watch athletes. When her famed curls were shortened to a bob last year in Manhattan by Barber Charles Bock, she put them in an envelope and took them home. Some of her pictures: The Poor Little Rich Girl, The Heart of the Hills, Pollyanna, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Tess of the Storm Country, Little Annie Roomy, My Best Girl. Syncopation (Radio-Keith-Orpheum). By this time even rural communities must find the separation, due to a third party's intrigue, of a team-of dancing partners, a story that can he interesting only for its digressions. In this first picture made by a new and technically competent producing company, the digressions are brightly filled with shadows borrowed from vaudeville and the legitimate stage and set in motion by the music of Waring's Pennsylvanians, one of the best dance-orchestras in the world. Best tune--"Tin Pan Parade." Alibi (United Artists) is more credible than most crook pictures. Director Roland West makes it move fast by spacing dialog with pantomime. Chester Morris gives a valid interpretation of a young man who. in the beginning, comes out of jail a gunman, and in the end goes back, still a gunman, because he cannot prove that-he was in the theatre with a policeman's daughter at the moment-when a detective was murdered. Worst shot--prolonged death of the detective. Best sound shot-- liquor gurgling out of a carafe.