The New Pictures

The Constant Nymph (British). This silent adaptation of Margaret Kennedy's novel has faults which no U. S. producer would have allowed. The lighting is bad; the direction is prosaic; the photography is dull except for some fine shots of the Austrian Tyrol; the actors are obviously actors; the subtitles are verbose. It suffers also the phrases of incontinuity inevitable in a picture made from a long and not particularly compact book. But none of these flaws is important. What was good in the story is alive in the film too--the emotion of something wild beating against influences arranged to tame it. A woman named Mabel Poulton, who used to be a stenographer in London, plays the part of Tessa, the composer's daughter who remembers the thundering music of mountainsides too well to endure the organized drabness of a Brussels pension. Best shot: Miss Poulton standing wearily in front of the window out of which she is going to jump before she struggles, with dismayed and frantic awkwardness, to open it.

Four Feathers (Paramount). Feature pictures of animal life in unfamiliar places have been fairly popular even when there was no story in them. It was natural that some producer should try to combine an authentic panorama of some wild continent with a romance of gallantry, love. Baboons getting away from a fire, with fast, soft paws and little eyes brightened by fear and a far flame's reflection; bull hippopotamuses lunging down to the water in the jungle morning, were photographed in North Africa by Producers Cooper and Schoedsack, who made Chang and Grass. Getting these scenes took a year and a half and was worth it. Hollywood craftsmen spliced around them a silly but exciting story about an Englishman whose best friends hand him white feathers when they find out he is scared of going to war against the blacks. When his sweetheart hands him the fourth white feather, he starts a series of heroic deeds which result in preserving his three friends in turn and possibly also the British Empire. The last reel fades out as he is about to hand the fourth feather back to Fay Wray. Best shot: a monkey carrying a piece of string over the wall of the black hole of Ondurman.

She Goes to War (Inspiration). The cinema has had a dreadful time trying to be convincing about the War. The Big Parade was fine for a couple of reels until the old hokum began to stick out. This picture is like The Big Parade in the way some of the battle scenes are handled, but except when mechanical explosions give it energy it is an entirely unreal lyric about a Southern girl who had two sweethearts, one of whom turned out to be a coward. He was drunk when the bugle blew, and when she told him to get out and join the ranks he belched in her pretty face. So she put on his tin hat and got in his place and won a battle for the regiment by shooting a German machine gunner. Actress Eleanor Boardman and Director Henry King do the best they can with their material. Best shot: tanks going into action.

Eleanor Boardman used to be the Eastman Kodak girl. On the backs of magazines she rested, smiling dreamily, in fields of daisies, wearing a picture hat. You saw her in drug-store windows and on billboards with pine trees or mountain peaks or salt waves, canyons, and, of course, cameras for a background. She had grown up and gone to school in Philadelphia and studied painting and interior decorating because she wanted to be able to do something. She had been trying to get in the film business as an art director when she took her first role as an extra. That was five years ago, in Souls for Sale. She has appeared in several mediocre pictures--The Auction Block, Tell It to the Marines--and in one masterpiece, The Crowd, which was directed by her husband, King Vidor.

The Studio Murder Mystery (Paramount). You know the leading man is going to be murdered because each member of the cast has a good reason for killing him and because you have read the title. This part of the picture is nicely constructed and told with some good shots of a Hollywood studio--the only ones that have come along for quite a while. When the actor is found dead on Stage Ten you stay to find out who killed him-- his wife, his director, the nightwatchman's daughter, or her brother, or the nightwatchman, or the fellow who is in love with her. You guess all the time that the director did it, so you are disappointed to find in the end that you were right. The comedy supplied by Neil Hamilton is supposed to open windows so that air can freshen up the suspense, but Hamilton gets boring and the technical detail is much too sloppy for a murder story. Best shot: the murdered man sitting in a chair usually reserved for a stage dummy.