The New Pictures

Thunderbolt (Paramount). George Bancroft must swagger. He must baffle enemies by his bullying ironic composure. He must love. He can be victorious at the end, or die with a roar of laughter spraying from his corded throat. Most of the films arranged to satisfy these conditions have been acceptable entertainment, but this one is foolish. It tells about some prisoners in a death house and Bancroft's determination not to die before he gets even with Richard Arlen because Arlen stole his girl, Fay Wray. Director Von Sternberg's adventurous photography and Bancroft's acting might make you swallow all this, but it is hard to believe that the death house is such a jolly place that the men there laugh at everything; that their conversational idiom is a stylized, usually vacuous, vaudeville patter; that they get married on the premises and keep pets and have music all day long--quartets, band selections, spirituals. Typical shot: Bancroft hitting another convict on the head with a pistol butt while somebody in another cell sings "Rockaby Baby."

Bancroft is 6 ft. 2 in. tall, weighs 195 pounds. He grew up in respectable Philadelphia, disturbing the neighbors until his family sent him to Tome School. As a little boy he went to the Army-Navy football game and said he liked the blue suits better than the grey suits and that when he grew up he wanted to wear a blue suit like that and be an admiral. He forgot about this but his family did not, and when he got out of Tome he found that they expected the appointment to Annapolis which they had secured for him would fulfill an ambition he had cherished all his life. At Annapolis he was stroke of a class crew. He resigned to go to New York and get on the stage. He played in some unimportant legitimate plays, then as the villain in Paramount melodramas. He was the first villain who made himself nasty by being in a good humor all the time. His best pictures were Underworld and The Docks of New York. He is married and has a daughter.

The Idle Rich (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). A good idea, perceptible for a minute or two in this comedy of middle-class snobbery, is quickly lost in sequences of derivative writing, dull directing, ham acting. Families who are neither rich nor poor think more about money than any other class of people. This family makes its concern for money a comic trait of snobbery by elaborate attempts to prove that money is unimportant. They become snobs by their anxiety to resist what they mistake for influences of snobbery when the middle-class daughter marries Millionaire Conrad Nagel. Bessie Love is in it, but she does nothing to remind you of her fine acting in The Broadway Melody. Typical shot: Nagel getting his hand on a pin cushion while trying to be comfortable on a middle-class daybed.

The One Woman Idea (Fox). Nobody as a rule has much objection to the love affair between Lady Alicia Douglas and the Indian potentate who carries such a lot of jewelry around with him. She meets him on the boat, but when they get to Marseilles duty forces her back to her husband, the caddish and lascivious nobleman. One night in India later on, Lord Douglas is stabbed by the relatives of the little dancing girl he followed to the harem, leaving his wife free to enter matrimony with the potentate on a British basis. Fixed up with a few tunes and a good-looking chorus of harem girls this story has always been all right, but as a serious dramatic vehicle for an actor as pompous as Rod La Rocque it is terrible. Typical shot: close-up of the Rajah's casket of paste jewels.

At the Edge of The World (UFA). H. G. Wells had nothing to do with making this German allegory of War and Peace but if he saw it he might write a testimonial to its merits. Laid at a hypothetical edge of anywhere, it concerns the same problems in mankind's future that continually agitate Mr. Wells, but treats them more graphically and less bookishly than he is in the habit of treating them. Its images are curious and handsome. Rooted solidly in the earth, a windmill flutters four great arms against a sky pregnant with shellfire. A war of the future, fought between unnamed nations whose guns belch poisonous gases with their projectiles, interrupts the alternating work and carnival of the miller, his daughter and neighbors. Although as a story the film has the insubstantiality of all stories that derive the particular from the abstract, its treatment is fairly adequate to the originality of its idea. Good shots: the miller beguiled by the peddler who is a spy; the dark riders going to the carnival.

Drag (First National). Bills for this picture, stenciling Richard Barthelmess as "greater than when he sang and talked in Weary River" seem distinctly cautious in view of the fact, now established, that his singing in that production was done for him by a tenor hidden somewhere offstage. He could be billed, still without much forfeit of caution, as better than in any picture in the last three years, for Barthelmess pictures have been pretty bad and Drag--which has nothing to do with Mae West's story--is fair enough. Best shot: the Parker family looking over the new Barthelmess apartment.