The New Pictures

Lightnin' (Fox). The old play which the late Frank Bacon helped to write and which he played 1,291 times on Broadway is now a vehicle for some adroit homespun fooling by Will Rogers. It is not so good as a picture as it was on the stage because the camera too often follows wandering sequences of the plot, but it is handsomely arranged and fairly funny. Will Rogers seems to enjoy himself as the boozing but golden-hearted rustic whose only decisive action is a refusal to sign papers that would have permitted his wife to sell her hotel to a syndicate of confidence men. There are times, however, when he is too consciously ingenuous and lovable to be palated. Possibly he feels that the part forces him to be that way, but the fact remains that his naivete and sweetness have become more pronounced in every picture he has made. If Lightnin' is any indication, the most racy and witty of U. S. public characters, colyumists, unofficial ambassadors to the world and licensed government jesters, is turning cute. Best shot: Lightnin' telling lies to a stranger he meets in a cabin in the woods.

The Blue Angel (UFA). So accurately is this carpentered from the successful elements of such pictures as The Last Laugh and The Way of All Flesh that if any other actor had been cast to play it he would have been criticized for imitating Emil Jannings. But if The Blue Angel is familiar material, it is also the sort of hing that Jannings does better than anyone else. Once more he shows the disintegration of an elderly man, this time a schoolteacher who falls in love with a cabaret singer (Marlene Dietrich). He only went to the cabaret to find where his pupils were spending their time, but he drank too much and stayed all night; the headmaster heard about it and discharged him. He marries the singer and works in her floor show as assistant to a magician. When he finds'that his wife is unfaithful to him, his sick brain cracks completely. It is effective theatre and the brilliant performances of Jannings and Miss Dietrich make it believable. The first important talking picture in English made in Germany, The Blue Angel was directed by an American, Josef von Sternberg, yet its faults are characteristically Teutonic -- lack of pace and a morbidity so profound that at times it amounts to mawkishness. Specimen shot: Marlene Dietrich singing in garters, a cloak, and high-heeled slippers. Emil Jannings' voice is sonorous, but his accent is curiously thick for an actor who was born in Brooklyn, N. Y. His parents went back to Germany before he had learned to talk much English. He is one of the many competent graduates of Max Reinhardt's theatre. His European pictures had made him famous in the U. S. long before he worked in Hollywood, but Paramount believed he could never learn to talk well enough to make sound-pictures and when his contract was up they let him go. He has a villa in Salzkam-mergut, Austria, where he fishes from the dock in a peajacket, short pants and an alpine hat. He is making pictures for UFA. It is not likely that he will come back. Scarlet Pages (First National). A female attorney defending a cabaret dancer charged with killing her brutal foster father finds out that the girl is the baby she left at an orphanage 20 years before. This climax of Scarlet Pages is one which most cinema seers will anticipate before they have been in their seats five minutes. A problem implicit in Scarlet Pages, no less satisfactorily settled in the denouement, is why First National should have thought it was worth producing. They produced it to give Elsie Ferguson a chance to play the courtroom scene which she played on the stage (TIME, Sept. 23, 1929). It is therefore too bad that Miss Ferguson's skillful voice records very badly. Best role: John Halliday as a district attorney. Follow the Leader (Paramount). The talents that have made Ed Wynn one of the most appreciated music hall comedians of his generation are not numerous or subtle, but highly adequate. He has a way of talking fast and fluttering his fingers when he is frightened. He has a silly laugh and a long hooked nose. His eyes roll with a sort of perpetual restrained hysteria in this comedy, for as in his stage successes he is always in trouble, profoundly confused and struggling with terrible situations. He is leader of the Hudson Duster gang, a position thrust on him through no fault of his own. The funniest sequence is the one in which he is supposed to kidnap Ethel Merman. Typical gag: Wynn trying to decide how much chloroform to give his victim by experimenting on himself. The Boudoir Diplomat (First National). By changing the title, taking out the lines in which sex was alluded to in a way that could not be interpreted as meaning friendship, altering cynical diplomats and a rakish young attache into phantoms still faintly debonair but respectable enough at bottom to be accepted in wholesome U. S. homes, the producers have managed to make a picture out of The Command to Love, Manhattan stage hit blacklisted by Will Hays. The story still concerns a young attache at an embassy in a small Balkan country whose ambassador commands him, as a. duty to his country, to make love to the wife of the local minister of war--a request that embarrasses the attache because he is already carrying on an affair with the ambassador's wife. It is too bad that somehow the little changes necessary in making an immensely witty farce fit for the cinema have taken the life out of the story. Best (unconscious) line: Mary Duncan (as Countess Krakowitz)--"Ah think it suits ma tempament." Fast and Loose (Paramount). The dialog for this fable was written by Preston Sturges who wrote that famed play of love in a speakeasy, Strictly Dishonorable. There is nothing in the quiet and moderately stencilled lines of Fast and Loose to suggest Sturges' masterpiece, but Fast and Loose ends far more wittily than its dull opening sequences forecast. A millionaire whose drunken son is engaged to a chorus girl and whose flippant daughter falls in love with a mechanic, manages by a stratagem to persuade the chorus girl and the mechanic to marry the mates whom they were about to turn down for lacking character. His stratagem is to earn sympathy for his children by cutting them off without a cent. Nothing about Fast and Loose approaches realism, but almost anyone can sit through it. Best shot: a raid on a Long Island road house.

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