The New Pictures

Forbidden Adventure-- (Paramount). If two child cinemactors were taken to London by their mothers to derive favor able publicity from meeting a king the same age as themselves, it might happen that one of them, a small girl with a re bellious disposition, would make friends with the king, conspire with him to escape from an environment in which all the things that amuse children were forbidden. It might happen that if the other child cinemactor, an urchin with a disgruntled disposition, overheard their plans, he would demand to be taken with them. The three might then join a gang of small wharf rats, foil kidnappers who noticed their good clothes, become slightly home sick, finally be retrieved by detectives.

All this does happen in Forbidden Ad venture, adapted from a story written by Author Sinclair Lewis when he was not in a critical mood. The first part of the pic ture, less diverting than the London ad venture, concerns the efforts of the two mothers to promote their children, keep them out of mischief and disguise their plebeian origins by plutocratic gestures. Good shots : the mother of Daisy Tate ejecting the King of Slovaria from her suite because she thinks he is a bellhop; the King of Slovaria fondling a frog to get warts; Tiny Tim Tiffany trying to sneer while crying.

The list of child cinemactors is particularly large and able at present. One of the most extraordinary is Mitzi Green. In Forbidden Adventure she is Daisy Tate; Tiny Tim Tiffany is Jackie Searl ; the King of Slovaria is Bruce Line, a new child actor with a cultivated voice. As Daisy Tate, Mitzi is somewhat miscast, for the part is sympathetic and her chief talent is to irritate. A disagreeable, incredibly impertinent child with a sarcastic laugh and an air of independence, she seems totally composed of frogs & snails & puppy dogs' tails, and likely to grow worse as she grows older. Audiences watch and long to beat her. She is the child who yells in every Pullman car, the urchin whose sticky and precocious fingerprint is on the page of books not fit for kindergarten reading. In private, her character is less appalling, though she is noted for her impudent mimicries of Moran & Mack, Maurice Chevalier, Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor, Groucho Marx. Aged 10. she is insured for $1,000,000, makes $625 a week, supports her parents who put her in their vaudeville act when she was 4. She has a brother in high school, a dog named Von, as much time to play as most noncinemacting children. Previous roles: Becky, in Tom Sawyer; Eloise, in Skippy ; a blackmailing urchin in Honey.

Laughing Sinners (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is the title given to a cinemas-culated version of Torch Song, the play by Kenyon Nicholson which was the first outstanding success of the past Manhattan season. In Torch Song Author Nicholson played about with a case of mistaken identity between sex and religion. He showed his heroine joining the Salvation Army when deserted by a traveling salesman, later having a reunion with her lover when she tried to convert him. This aspect of the story has been overlooked in the cinema, which tells a plain and not particularly stirring case-history of a girl who misbehaves, reforms, reverts to misbehavior, then to reformation. Much of the action takes place in a small-town hotel where traveling salesmen are shown engaged in chores and recreation. Particularly partial to the latter is an aged, bald-headed casket vendor (Guy Kibbee). He chuckles quietly when a lady drinks herself unconscious, employs the absurd severity of inebriation in telling the heroine that there is nothing worth crying about.

Laughing Sinners was started six months ago, later scrapped and remade. As a result Joan Crawford, whose duty it is to portray the indecisions of the salesman's playmate, appears as a brunette in some sequences, a blonde in others. In almost all of them she acts well and makes her dilemma seem both plausible and pathetic. Actor Hamilton is a little too unctuous as the salesman. Actor Gable, hitherto an impersonator of hard-boiled characters, seems slightly puzzled to find himself banging a Salvation Army drum.

The Black Camel (Fox) is an amusing mystery story in which the corpse is that of a cinemactress, the scene Hawaii, the detective celebrated Charlie Chan, the suspects as follows: a patently fake male fortuneteller, a slick actor in a dinner coat, a pretty little girl who steals an emerald ring, a butler who does not know his place, a young millionaire who drives a roadster and is anxious to get out of town, a maid servant, a man who mumbles indignantly, a beachcombing artist with sneering enunciation, a tough blonde who incites Detective Chan to aphorism. After several aphorisms (sample: "Death is a black camel who kneels unbidden at the gate of every man"), suitable rebukes to an overenthusiastic assistant, and three narrow escapes which do not cause him to modify his placid nonchalance, Detective Chan reveals the guilty suspect, explains the actions of the others.

The Girl Habit (Paramount) is a farce which uses the oldest, most dependable methods for producing hilarity. Whether it succeeds or not depends entirely on the mood and taste of individuals in the audience who will find it i) screamingly funny, 2) rather silly, 3) crazy but dull. It concerns itself with the predicaments and escapes of a young man who seems to have a perpetual case of the jitters (Charles Ruggles). Engaged to marry a debutante with a dignified mother, he is pursued with kindly intent by an ardent blonde (Tamara Geva), later, with less kindly intent, by her gangster husband. To escape the gangster, the young man tries to get himself jailed, succeeds in going to the same jail as the gangster. Here he finds the warden guilty of crooked bookkeeping, is later discovered, by his fiancee and mother, lying under a bed which belongs to the warden's wife. The suspense which provokes most of the comedy in The Girl Habit would vanish in a moment of unbiased consideration. But the picture runs along so fast that this moment never arrives. Although she has the role of a villainness, The Girl Habit serves as a satisfactory vehicle for the U. S. cinema debut of Tamara Geva, hitherto known for her dancing (in the Chauve Souris, in Whoopee, in the "Body and Soul" episode of Three's a Crowd) and her beauty--blonde, with a strangely triangular face, large, exciting eyes. Her career in Europe had the same twists-- she danced in the Diaghilev ballet, was later featured in two UFA cinemas. Before that, she had grown up in Russia, won a dancing contest in Petrograd at 17. She is now 23, pronounces her name with a soft G, to rhyme with Eva.

Able shots: Ruggles trying to throw a brick through a window, kidnapping a child, telling the warden's wife that her face would not stop a clock, if it was a good clock.

-- Released in Manhattan as Newly Rick.

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