The New Pictures

Song O' My Heart (Fox). John McCormack's first picture, the second feature talkie to be made by a first-rate singer (Lawrence Tibbett's Rogue Song was the first) was directed by Frank Borzage, a director whose specialty it is to lay over his interiors and landscapes a film of sentiment much like the tearful coloring with which John McCormack colors his celebrated upper register. In his customary manner, Mr. Borzage uses up a lot of film exhibiting the Irish village whence sprang the great ballad singer, the hero of the story. It is a badly integrated, inconclusive little story of frustrated love, frankly just a vehicle for Tenor McCormack. He sings eleven songs. His voice records beautifully, the slight metallic timbre of the talking machine eliminating the saccharine that makes McCormack cloying in his natural state. Song O' My Heart will undoubtedly be the greatest movie of the year to people who like "I Hear You Calling Me" on the phonograph. Silliest shot: McCormack's truelove dying of a broken heart.

Such Men are Dangerous (Fox). A Sunday-supplement story, taking one of its angles from the disappearance of Belgian Tycoon Alfred Loewenstein from his plane two years ago, has a rich man pretending to be dead in order to assume a new identity. To humiliate his wife for not loving him the way he is, he wants to make her love him as somebody else. A surgeon changes him from a crook-shouldered, gross, bearded, bespectacled, wedge-nosed fellow, to a straight, handsome cineman--to the likeness in fact, of Warner Baxter, who plays the role in both guises. Elinor Glyn, ablest living fabricator of Sunday-supplement fiction, made it all up and did a job which, in spite of its puerile aspects, has possibilities as entertainment. What makes Suck Men Are Dangerous silly is not the plot, acting or direction, but the awful dialog, written by Ernest Vajda. Specimen lines:

The Heroine (sweetly): "The story of Cinderella will never grow old, will it?"

The Hero (awed): "I would not have expected a remark like that from you."

Typical shot: Baxter lifting a little boy up to collect a kiss from his wife--a kiss for which, at a society fair, he has bid 20,000 francs.

Mamba (Tiffany). Mamba is a name applied by South African natives to a particularly dangerous snake. They applied it also to Jean Hersholt, who takes the part of a rich, bestial, childishly sensitive plantation owner. Hersholt is a believable character, but the others--the aristocratic but destitute girl he buys in Germany and marries to use as a wedge for getting into German East African society, or the handsome young officer who becomes her lover --are not much more than figurines out of a yellow-back. The whole picture is in color. The flickering, gaudy, jungle colors, combined with a jumble of talk which one must accept as African, German-African, English-African, English-German and German-English-African, work on two of the senses with a dizzying effect. Most expected line: Eleanor Boardman, in a postnuptial scene with the gross Mamba, exclaiming: "No, not that!" Jean Hersholt won some prizes for portrait painting at the Academy of Arts at Copenhagen. He quit painting and went on the stage, directed his own productions. He was staging the Danish National Fair in San Francisco in 1915 when he made the connections that got him his first job in pictures. He played the villain in Eric von Stroheim's Greed. Because of his thick, moist lower lip, stubborn pompadour and beady eyes set close together, he almost always plays villains. He is unusually good-natured and shrewd. He collects stamps, is a good hockey player, a director of several Hollywood banks. Some of his pictures: Abie's Irish Rose, Stella Dallas, The Old Soak.

Only the Brave (Paramount). This starts off as a serious picture in the best romantic manner, and then, as though the producers had become self-conscious about the whole thing, its tone changes to an agreeable irony. People who come in late enough to catch Gary Cooper, as a northern spy, telling his southern sweetheart, Mary Brian, that it is her duty to give him up to the Confederates, while she argues that it will be better for her to save his life, may believe that Only the Brave is very funny. Such a conclusion would be premature, for once more the feeling of the unstable story changes. Cooper, caught and sentenced to die, is saved for love by the timely arrival of the boys in blue. Decorative photography and its satiric moments make Only the Brave better than the average program picture in spite of its uncertainties of intention. Best shot: William Le Maire as a Confederate private delivering the soliloquy containing the line "There are but two kinds of women in the world--blondes and brunettes."

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