The New Pictures

Pardon Us (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is the first full-length comedy made by Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Hopelessly in effectual in all their doings, they are particularly and painfully inefficient in this picture. First shown planning to manufacture homebrew, they are next seen being sentenced to prison because of their clumsiness. Added to the basic handicap of the Laurel face -- blank, ugly, absurd --is the handicap in Pardon Us of a loose tooth which causes him to punctuate all his sentences with a vulgar and sarcastic noise.

These noises, perpetrated at inopportune moments, cause Laurel and Hardy to be persecuted by their jailers and fellow prisoners. When they escape from prison and, wearing blackface, take to working in a cottonfield, Laurel's impolite articulations cause their disguises to be penetrated.

Returned to jail, Laurel & Hardy attempt to take part in a jailbreak. But so muddled are their efforts that they aid the authorities more than the inmates and are rewarded by a pardon.

Screen comedians reach a crisis when they graduate from two-reel comedies to six-reel feature films. Funnymen Laurel & Hardy emerge from the crisis as funny as ever but no funnier. Their incapacities, hilarious in earlier and briefer studies, seem protracted in Pardon Us: they have added nothing to their formula except vulgarity. Funny shots: Laurel & Hardy making friends with the bloodhounds which have been sent to trail them; sing ing "Good morning, dear teacher," in the prison school; going to bed in the same cot so awkwardly that they break the cot.

Stanley Laurel and Oliver Hardy use their own names for the characters whom they impersonate in their pictures. Funny man Laurel was understudy to Charlie Chaplin when they both belonged to Fred Carno's London comedy company. When Mack Sennett saw Charlie Chaplin and Chaplin left the company to go into cinema, Laurel considered him "a fool for leaving." In 1917, playing a vaudeville engagement in Los Angeles, Stanley Laurel met Chaplin again, was persuaded to try a movie contract himself.

Oliver Hardy's father was an Atlanta, Ga. politician. Oliver was graduated from the University of Georgia Law School but preferred to sing for his living. He went into cinema from vaudeville, joined the Hal Roach (Our Gang) company in 1926. In 1927, he stopped using the nickname "Babe," changed to Oliver for numerological reasons. In 1927, also, he met Stan Laurel. They formed an immediate partnership, now have a song about it: "Ham & Eggs, Salt & Pepper, Bread & Butter, Laurel & Hardy, United we stand--divided we flop."

An expert golfer, Funnyman Hardy has won 24 cups and two gold medals; nonetheless, he is fat and soft-looking. Laurel is thin and pale, speaks with a low-grade London accent. Funnyman Laurel seems to be the more stupid of the two, but not by very much. In Pardon Us, the teacher in the prison school asks him how many times 3 goes into 9. Laurel's answer: "Three times--and two left over." Hardy's answer: "He's wrong--there's only one left over."

The Last Flight (First National) is about four aviators and a girl whose full name, so far as it is revealed to the audience, is Nikki (Helen Chandler). The time is just after the Armistice, the scene is Paris, later Lisbon. The aviators, in a state of nervous disorder produced by their experiences in the War, are trying to regain their composure by conducting a light-headed patrol of Paris barrooms. They are so engaged when they come upon Nikki near the door of a crowded saloon holding, with a rapt expression, as though it were a chalice, a cocktail glass containing a set of false teeth. In company with

Nikki the aviators continue their attempts to improve their states of minds by antics with cab-horses, hotel elevators, the furniture in Nikki's apartment. Their final and most disastrous escapade is a trip to Lisbon. Here one of the aviators jumps into a bull ring and is gored to death by the bull. Another shoots a disagreeable reporter and runs away after the shooting. A third, accidentally hit by a bullet, expires in theatrical fashion, seated in a horse-cab. The fourth aviator (Richard Barthelmess) is left with Nikki.

At times it becomes apparent that there is the material for a good, possibly a fine picture in The Last Flight but such moments only make it the more painfully clear that it is not a fine, not even a good picture. Derived from a novel by John Monk Saunders, the mood of the picture even more than the book seems to have been induced by an author who was trying to imitate Ernest Hemingway with one hand and Philip Barry with both feet. The comedy is only laughable in spots--as when Nikki changing her slippers, explains why by saying: "On account of I can run faster in red shoes." Sophisticated audiences may be pleased to detect something unusual--a subtle and difficult theme --in the film but they will sympathize with other cinemaddicts who are likely to criticize it by laughing at the wrong places.

Daughter of the Dragon (Paramount) shows the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu (Warner Oland) far less insidious than he seemed in the stories of Sax Rohmer, engaged in homicide on an ambitious scale but in a manner too placid to be awful. Brought to his deathbed early in the picture, he charges his daughter (Anna May Wong) to continue his program of extermination. This she attempts to do, in the case of a British aristocrat and his son, who falls in love with her. She is hindered by the ministrations of a Chinese detective, who loves her also but does not permit affection to interfere with professional obligations. The picture, lacking the thickly gruesome atmosphere contrived by Author Sax Rohmer, is further handicapped by poor dialog and ineffective acting; the blood that is spilled in it seems scarcely as thick as water. Ablest members of the cast are the orientals--Anna May Wong and Sessue Hayakawa, who has not made a picture in Hollywood since 1921. After disbanding the company he had formed to make pictures featuring himself, Cinemactor Hayakawa acted in English and French cinemas, wrote a novel, played a brief dramatization of it in vaudeville. For the last year he has been acting in Japan--an unprecedented feat since Japanese stage tradition required that an actor come from a family of actors, and the father of Sessue Hayakawa was a provincial governor. His repertory in Tokyo included Honorable Mr. Wang, in Japanese costume; Seventh Heaven, in Japanese language, European clothes; and his own translation of The Three Musketeers.

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