The New Pictures

Caught Short (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). The stockmarket is only distantly related to the activities of Marie Dressier and Polly Moran, boardinghouse keepers in a suburban community, who are the central figures of this picture. There are funny moments but almost none of the picture, except for outworn slapstick devices, is comedy at all. Audiences squeal with laughter at the irritability, the pomposity, the numberless sharp, unhappy angles, all grossly caricatured, which life has inflicted on these rival landladies. So sharply and truly are the characters realized and so right, at times, are the lines written for them, that if played without exaggeration and made to depend for its suspense on the story, tenuous as that is, instead of on its alleged humorous qualities, Caught Short might have been effective "straight" drama. Marie Dressier, although she overplays, acts brilliantly as the landlady who is afraid of the market, but who goes in it to compete with her friend across the street. Best shot: a drowsy boarder appearing in pajamas at the landlady's party, asking her to unlock the bathroom door so that he can take a bath.

The Big House (Cosmopolitan). To outlanders who have not yet seen two excellent plays of Broadway's past season --The Criminal Code and The Last Mile --the potent realism with which The Big House depicts penitentiaries and their inmates will be a startling revelation. Director George Hill has taken advantage of the tenseness which underlies the lives of several thousand men caught in a thick-walled, concrete trap, has interpreted it in terms of shapeless, shuffling shoes, sour faces, bug races, hammering tin cups, foodslops. But the story that Director Hill has been given to tell and the morals he has to preach somewhat diminish the effective detail which his camera and microphones and actors offer.

Young Kent (Robert Montgomery), a weakling jailed for running down a man after a New Year's eve party, is lodged in a cramped cell with Morgan (Chester Morris), a forger, and Butch (Wallace Beery), a killer. Morgan escapes, meets and falls in love with Kent's beauteous sister (Leila Hyams), is apprehended and returned to jail. A jailbreak which the regenerated Morgan discourages is attempted, for which the officials are prepared by Kent's perfidy. Morgan saves the lives of the hostage guards and is pardoned, after which he departs for the South Seas with Miss Hyams.

The Big House is a product of William Randolph Hearst's Hollywood plant (Cosmopolitan) and savors of a celluloid Hearstian editorial. Lines are introduced denouncing the crowded conditions of U. S. prisons along with the doctrine that Crime Does Not Pay. Lewis Stone, the square-shooting warden, is called upon to say that his prisoners are restless because they have no work, the food is bad because there are insufficient appropriations, his institution is overpopulated because "they want to send them to jail, but they won't build jails big enough to hold them." Some of the guards are shown to be kindly, some are tyrannous. Shaven-headed Wallace Beery turns in a star's performance as the childishly ferocious gunman who is willing to kill his best pal for a packet of cigarets. Best shot: the hopeless silence in the dim corridor of the solitary confinement cells.

When he was 16 Wallace Beery ran away from home (Kansas City, Mo.) with Ringling Bros, circus. He was made caretaker of the "largest herd of elephants in captivity." In the elephant stable Beery had sometimes hummed to himself as he worked. Feeling that his voice was good, he tried out for a musical comedy and was hired as a singer but soon made star comedian. In 1913 he went to work playing a Swedish maid in the old Essenay comedies. His first serious picture was called The Unpardonable Sin. He married Gloria Swanson, divorced her in 1918 on grounds of desertion. He weighs 235 lb., owns a Travel Air monoplane, likes shooting, fishing. His best pictures were the comedies he made for Paramount with Raymond Hatton: We're in the Navy Now; Fireman, Save My Child; Now We're in the Air.

The New Movietone Follies of 1930 (Fox) is an ambling program piece about a rich boy about to be disinherited by his uncle because of his interest in chorus girls. He is allowed to marry the stage lady he likes best only when it has been revealed that his amatory tastes are shared, clandestinely, by the uncle himself. There is some routine singing and dancing; William Collier Jr. and Miriam Seegar are in it. Typical shot: a Broadway musical production taken to the country and staged on Uncle's palatial estate.

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