The New Pictures

Around the World in 80 Minutes

(United Artists) is an animated album of vacation photographs, showing how an ingenious celebrity comports himself abroad. The celebrity is Douglas Fairbanks. The pictures of Fairbanks '"doing" the Orient are accompanied by a mono-log, written by Robert Sherwood, in which Fairbanks makes comments, derisive or enthusiastic, on himself and his surroundings.

First comes a shot of Fairbanks running around a boat deck; then one of Fairbanks dressed in a bath-towel, doing his exercises. In Japan he plays golf, provides a pictorial essay on Nipponese methods of hairdress, has his cameraman photograph Fujiyama. Next is a picture of a map, with Fairbanks running across Asia and making a big jump to get to the Philippines. In Siam he has lunch with King Prajadhipok, laughs at the picture of himself perspiring in a stiff collar. In India he examines a snake, shoots a leopard, expresses conventional approbation of the Taj Mahal by moonlight. The commentary is gay, sometimes painfully so. When elephants lollop in a river, Fairbanks says: "They wear nothing but their trunks." Commenting on a Japanese prizefight, he imitates a radio announcer, ends with, "Graham McNamee announcing." There is no pun about Chinese junk. Pictorially, Around the World in 80 Minutes is nothing much. But the cinema has always before treated information as a bore; travelogs have almost without exception been sad and spiritless products proving, to the accompaniment of chop-suey music, that all Chinese look alike. This travelog is a novelty because it is witty and de luxe, the record of a trip which must have been fun and of a personality which is happy, egoistic, alert. Douglas Fairbanks obviously enjoyed making it, should enjoy a handsome profit from his pleasure. Last week he set off for the Orient again, this time accompanied by four technicians. Director Lewis Milestone and Writer Robert Benchley.

Over the Hill (Fox) is old-fashioned cinema, dealing sadly with filial ingratitude and the poorhouse. Its story is simple, straight from the old hokum bucket: Ma Shelby (Mae Marsh) rears her children in a sacrificial way, tenderly requiring them to wash behind the ears and eat their porridge. When they mature, it is found that her ministrations have spoiled them, or else that they have inherited unhappy characteristics from their father, a bootlegger but a bad provider. One of the sons becomes a pompous hack-painter, married to a sleek and dressy strumpet. Another is an enfeebled hypocrite, whining at his wife instead of beating her, given to opening letters addressed to other persons. The daughter is married to an envious and impoverished lout. The only good son (James Dunn) has ill fortune. He is wrongfully imprisoned. On his release, he goes to Alaska on a mining trip which lasts so long that his return seems unlikely.

When he comes back, he finds that his salary of $80 per month which his mother should have been receiving has been appropriated by the worst of her brood, the hypocrite. Turned out by all her children, the old lady is scrubbing floors in an institution. James Dunn belabors his brother in a village street, retrieves his mother, marries his sweetheart (Sally Eilers), and proposes, in response to his mother's entreaties, a family reunion.

Over the Hill was a vast success in silent pictures in 1920. Mae Marsh-first famed for her portrayal of a girl who preferred death to dishonor in The Birth of a Nation-plays her present role in the mood that fits it, the mood of a decade ago. Sally Eilers and James Dunn have properly acquired the same frame of mind. Though the picture contains temporal contradictions-the moderne apartment of the hack-painter, the two-horse democrat in which Dunn goes to interrupt Mae Marsh's career at the Old Folks home-it should be popular again. It is a lachrymose anachronism, all the more touching perhaps because no one can believe it any more.

The Guilty Generation (Columbia) is a lively gang picture. Chief interest is supposed to be supplied by the offspring of the gangsters rather than the gangsters themselves. The daughter of one tycoon gangster meets, at her Florida debut, the son of her father's mortal enemy, a young man who has learned to be an architect. They marry. Furious, the girl's father (Leo Carrillo) threatens to kill his son-in-law, is killed himself by his aged mother. Critics wondered whether Hamlet would not make a better gangster plot than Romeo Or Juliet. The Age For Love (United Artists-Howard Hughes). Howard Hughes let it be known that he was seeking a suitable story for Billie Dove and then devoted a full year to selecting one. The Age for Love, adapted by Ernest Pascal from his own novel, does not seem worth the effort. The story is not offensively dull but it has been told, except for a few details, many times before. It is an imitation problem play, discussing an artificial dilemma in the rhetoric of tedious trivialities.

Billie Dove is a svelte literary agent. She becomes attracted to a dull young man named Dudley Crome (Charles Starrett) because she likes his refreshing ingenuousness, his simple tastes. These simple tastes are what complicate their married life. Crome wants her to stay at home and have a family. She wants to work. Presently they divorce. Crome marries a girl who sees things his way. She has already had a baby when the picture ends but despite this bond, usually infrangible in the cinema, Crome has returned to his first wife, is preparing to remarry her. Cinemactress Dove wears becoming clothes and acts so much better than her leading man that her performance, first in a year, seems more brilliant than it is. One excellent sequence at the beginning-a suburban dinner party at which the host (Adrian Morris) bullies his wife by patronizing her-is true enough (to put the rest of the picture out of focus.

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