The New Pictures

Lawful Larceny (RKO). Lowell Sherman directs and takes a lead role in Samuel Shipman's old drama of a wife's revenge. It is a problem play, the problem being whether a wife commits a crime when she goes to another woman's home, where her husband has been gambling away his substance, and brings his affec- tion and property home again. Full of theatrical cliches, Lawful Larceny is enlivened by the verbal improvisations and expansive mannerisms of Actor Lowell Sherman and by the skill of Director Lowell Sherman in giving Actor Sherman due opportunities. In spite of its familiarity, it moves fast enough to be fair entertainment. Best shot: Bebe Daniels going to work as secretary to the woman who has broken up her home.

Sweet Mama (First National). Because Alice White is the most attractive blonde of her weight in pictures, the scenes in which she appears are bearable, although this whole production is hackneyed, dull and amateurish. It is an unsuccessful combination of the usual elements of underworld plots; its crisis involves Miss White in efforts to get her sweetheart out of a predicament in which she has involved him by gathering evidence against the owner of the night-club where he works. Typical shot: police car chasing the car in which the hero is being taken for a ride.

Let Us Be Gay (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). This fragile but witty drawing room piece, successful on the Manhattan stage last year, is the sort of thing that the talking cinema in its present stage of development can do best. No Hollywood hack writing has been permitted to change the thread of the story, although the prelude of unhappy married life has been elaborated. Norma Shearer takes two parts--first a dowdy wife whose husband is tiring of her, and later, with an astonishing and somewhat overdramatic change in personality, a seductive divorcee. At a house-party given by an elderly woman she has met in Paris, she is called on to divert her former husband from making a conquest of the hostess' granddaughter. In casting and direction. Let Us Be Gay is an almost perfectly realized intention; it is distinguished by some wonderful acting by Marie Dressier as the sardonic, impatient dowager. Rod La Rocque and Gilbert Emery are in it too. Best shot: Marie Dressier at her knitting.

Marie Dressier, 59, has been on the stage and in pictures for 44 years. She was a famed comedian 25 years ago. Mack Sennett took her to Hollywood in 1914 to play in Chaplin comedies. She was a hit in Tittle's Punctured Romance, but for several years after that played in weak parts and slowly lost her reputation. Used to earning $2,500 a week, she was glad to take $150 for bit parts. Last spring her acting as a gin-soaked derelict in Anna Christie with Greta Garbo brought her international fame in a few weeks. Abroad on a holiday, she was rescued by bobbies from admirers who mobbed her in London. When in Europe she lives in pensions; she travels third cabin, having found that most steamship companies, aware of her name on the register, will move her gratis to the first cabin. In return for this courtesy she entertains at ships' concerts. She collects the drums, hats, dolls given away as favors in Paris restaurants and when motoring stops in obscure villages, puts the toys down in the road near a group of children, then drives off. Says she: "I get on a train. I look out of the window and if I see a little house going up, I bless it and the people who are building it. Maybe if I ever met them I'd want to kick them in the afterpiece. . . .

Old as I am and well known as I am, I don't ask to see a part before I take it. I take what I'm given and do the best I can." She believes in astrology, dislikes flappers, lives in the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles. Recently Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer made her a star. Her next picture will be The Dark Star.

The Man from Wyoming (Paramount). That authorship of this drama is attributed to Joseph Moncure (The Wild Party) March and John Van Al- styne (In American) Weaver does not keep it from being the sort of second-rate program picture that is turned out in immense yearly quantities by the nation's entertainment factories. It is something about a tall western engineer who enlists in the army, rescues from gunfire a Red Cross nurse (niece of the general in charge of his division), marries her, goes back to the front, is reported dead. He turns up again later when the nurse is stifling her sorrow by running a rowdy resort on the Riviera. It is all nicely photographed and acted with zest and stupidity by Gary Cooper and pretty, lymphatic June Collyer. Typical shot: philosophic conversation between the two principals about what war does to people.

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