The New Pictures

Union Depot (Warner). Douglas Fairbanks Jr. is an alert hobo who, after stealing a hat and coat from a men's washroom, reconnoitres in the station until he has a good suit of clothes, a roll of bills and a girl. His tramp companion picks up a parcel check which Fairbanks cashes for a violin case full of counterfeit money. Detectives looking for the counterfeiter find Fairbanks, when he is helping his girl to rid herself of a perverse admirer who wears dark glasses and a crippled foot. Eventually Fairbanks clears himself, but not until the counterfeiter, trying to retrieve his bills, has killed a policeman. In the meantime. Fairbanks and the counterfeiter play rough hide-&-seek among the shunting trains in the station yard.

Prompted, doubtless, by recent activities of Clark Gable and James Cagney, Fairbanks speaks rudely to Joan Blondell. At one point he fetches her a light clip on the jaw. Though Authors Kubec Glasmon and John Bright wrote dialog in their own idiom, the original authors, Gene Fowler and Joe Laurie Jr., were obviously thinking of Grand Hotel and possibly Transatlantic. But the cinema--artistically at least--is a good borrower and the fact is that stories in the pattern of Grand Hotel, Transatlantic, Union Depot are magnificently suited to cinematic 'expression. Fast, brief, unlikely and compact, this one is almost over before you remember to take your coat off. When you leave the theatre, you realize that you have been fooled, which is the purpose of such entertainments. Good shot: Fairbanks and his hobo companion (Guy Kibbee) walking along the track on which Joan Blondell's train for Salt Lake City is quickly disappearing.

Two Kinds of Women (Paramount). According to one of the minor articles in Hollywood's credo, all citizens of Manhattan who are not in the breadline or the bootlegging business live in severely modernistic penthouses. People who live in penthouses should not throw themselves out the window, but the villainess of this picture (Wynne Gibson) does so while intoxicated, mistaking a pair of glass doors which open on an airshaft for those which lead to the room where her inebriated guests are querulously listening to the barkings of a rolltop radio. The death of the villainess removes the last element of gaiety from the picture, permits Phillips Holmes, as a mustachioed playboy, and Miriam Hopkins, as a nice girl from the West, to obtain parental consent for matrimony. The involved train of events in Two Kinds of Women--adapted from Robert E. Sherwood's play This is New York--makes for comedy of a sort. One reason it fails to achieve it, is possibly Phillips Holmes, whose gloomy, dazzled and polite impersonation is identical, except for the mustache and his lines, with the one he gave in An American Tragedy.

On her way to a Manhattan public school, Wynne Gibson one day met two friends who were going to see a theatrical agent. She went with them, became a chorus girl in Tangerine. Like Stuart Erwin (who also appears in Two Kinds of Women, comparatively sober), she has distinguished herself by an ability to simulate drunkenness. Erwin is a happy toper, wayward, confident and dazed. Wynne Gibson, when simulating the effects of alcohol, grows querulous and sly. Her voice becomes a gentle whine, her hands dangle nervously as though she hoped to make a gesture, but had forgotten how. Small, slim, with red hair and green eyes, she is exhilarated in Two Kinds of Women, saturated in The Road to Reno, almost numb in Jarnegan.

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