The New Pictures

The Struggle (United Artists--D. W. Griffith). Director David Wark Griffith knew the patois of the cinema 15 years ago, but with his Abraham Lincoln of last year he revealed that he has not bothered to keep up with the times. The Struggle, written by Anita Loos and John Emerson, acted by Hal Skelly and Zita Johann, is a shiftless and pitiably stupid homily which, esthetically and financially, should be an embarrassment to all concerned. Its story--of a steel-worker who takes to tippling and ends up with a case of delirium tremens in a thunderstorm--is really no story at all. The dialog is atrocious. Hal Skelly gives a drivelling performance. Zita Johann is miscast. The direction is preWar. Typical shot: Skelly, drunk on two whiffs of speakeasy Scotch, staggering home to a wife who shudders at his reeking breath.

Good Sport (Fox). Kept ladies, where the cinema is concerned, are the female equivalent of gangsters. An entire flock of them appears in this picture. They disport themselves in a mood of mean frivolity, snapping their shoulder straps and rude comments at each other, while making things difficult for the heroine who associates with them in order to learn about her husband's extra-marital amusements. She (Linda Watkins) sub-leases the apartment which her husband has provided for his mistress. While he and the mistress (Greta Nissen) are abroad, she falls in love with a sober-sided young mining tycoon. When her husband comes home, she decides after a brief period of reluctance to go to California. The mining man (John Boles) is the one who sees her off at the station. All this is competently enough put together but, if tested by an emotional seismograph like the "Lie Detector," its graph would be full of dead spots. Shot: Greta Nissen asking her patron to buy her an emerald bracelet.

His Woman (Paramount) was apparently produced on the assumption that a picture containing both Claudette Colbert and Gary Cooper needs nothing else. As a result of this sad and typical mistake, the story is a tedious travelog in which Cooper, as the captain of a tramp steamer, and Miss Colbert, as nurse to a foundling whom the captain has picked up in a dory, voyage together from Central America to Manhattan. At the end of the voyage they are engaged. The foundling, an inarticulate urchin, gives a more sure-fire performance than either Cooper or Colbert. By crawling out on deck and sitting in the rain, he catches pneumonia. This indisposition resolves the difficulties which result from Cooper's discovery that his fiancee has been an inmate of a pleasure house in Cristobal. Shot: Cooper maintaining the tradition that no real man knows how to manipulate an infant, by splashing soapy water on the foundling's fundament.

The Cheat (Paramount). Pictures like this seem to explain the financial discomforts to which every cinema concern except Loew's Inc. (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is now subject. After fetching talented, exciting, polished Tallulah Bankhead home from the London stage with the intention of making her a picture star, Paramount has introduced her to U. S. cinemaddicts with three of the dustiest vehicles of the year. Tarnished Lady was claptrap about a girl who married for money and later regretted it. My Sin was a routine rigmarole about a lady who tried to conceal a Central American past in a Manhattan interior decorating establishment. The Cheat is along the same lines--about a girl who loses $20,000 gambling and to pay it, has to borrow from the villain of the piece. Her husband gives her money to cover the loan but the villain (Irving Pichel) refuses to accept a check. In two previous versions of the picture--one with Sessue Hayakawa and one with Pola Negri--this was the moment for the big scene where the heroine was branded with a red hot iron, on the back. As a novelty in this version, Irving Pichel applies the iron to Tallulah Bankhead's front,* murmuring vicious cliches as he does so. A court room scene comes later. The picture is well mounted but the plot is not nearly so diverting as Miss Bankhead's wrestling match with her material. Sample speech, from Pichel, when he is showing Bankhead a trophy case of dolls: "Once they were lovely women who were kind to me."

Flying High (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) shows Bert Lahr performing the role he made famous when the show was a Manhattan musicomedy. He is a bedazzled aviator who spends a night in a bathtub, then breaks the altitude record because he lacks sense enough to come down. Two of Flying High's best songs ("Thank Your Father," "Wasn't It Beautiful While It Lasted") have been whistled so much that they had to be left out, but in other respects the cinema improves the play.

*In the publicity pictures and advertisements, this novelty was foolishly overlooked. Cinemactress Bankhead is shown being branded from behind.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.