The New Pictures

So Big (Warner). Edna Ferber's Pulitzer Prize novel would have been a better picture if its story had been told in a manner more pictorial, less bookish. Yet it is the best cinema in which Barbara Stanwyck has appeared to date. She is Selina Peake, whose father, a Chicago gambler, gets shot in the course of business. He leaves her with an expensive education, no money, a belief that "life is so much velvet."

In a community of cabbage-growing Dutch-American yokels where Selina goes to teach school, she finds the velvet worn thin. She marries a farmer. When he dies, she struggles to give her son advantages that eventually make him ashamed of her. Become almost a clod herself, she is finally powerless to show him why he should be working in an architect's office for $35 a week instead of grubbing greedily in the stock market. Selina's only triumph comes, not from her son, but from an artist who, long before, had understood her assertion that cabbage-fields were beautiful. At the end of the picture she confides in him: "In all these years, I have done nothing."

Grand Hotel (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Weekly payroll for this film:

John Barrymore $8,350 (estimated)

Greta Garbo 6,500

Wallace Beery 3,500

Lionel Barrymore. . . . 2,500

Joan Crawford 2,250

Lewis Stone 750

Jean Hersholt 750

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer has made more money in the last two years than any other important cinema company. This is doubtless due in part to Vice President & Producing Chief Irving Thalberg's "two star" system for feature pictures. Grand Hotel gave Producer Thalberg a chance to enlarge upon his system to an extent which other producers hoped would prove a reductio ad absurdum. The cast of Grand Hotel is the most celebrated, the most expensive in cinema history. It would surely have included other Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer stars (Norma Shearer, Clark Gable, Marie Dressier, Robert Montgomery, Marion Davies, Buster Keaton, Jackie Cooper, John Gilbert, Ramon Novarro) if there had been a few more rooms in the Grand Hotel.

As it is, the hotel is well filled. In one room lives a ballet-dancer (Greta Garbo) who is bored by her art and her existence. Conveniently near, so that he can filch her pearls, is an attractive and impoverished Baron (John Barrymore). In a corridor, the Baron makes friends with a pretty stenographer (Joan Crawford). She is waiting to take dictation from a disagreeable textile tycoon (Wallace Beery). The tycoon, named Preysing, is so engrossed in dishonest tricks to escape financial ruin that he fails to recognize one of his own clerks. The clerk (Lionel Barrymore) is incurably ill; he has come to the hotel to finish his last days in one burst of unaccustomed luxury. Also to be observed are a sententious doctor (Lewis Stone) with a burned face, a hall-porter (Jean Hersholt) whose wife is having a baby. The conflicting aims of these people and their proximity naturally lead to startling readjustments. The dancer and the Baron fall in love. The stenographer is attracted by the Baron too, but she agrees to take a trip with Preysing. Presently the Baron goes to Preysing's room to steal. The stenographer sees Preysing kill the Baron by smashing him over the head with a telephone. The clerk is the one who makes sure that Preysing is arrested for murder. The dancer leaves the hotel expecting to meet the Baron at the railroad station.

When Vicki Baum, who fortnight ago stated she would henceforth reside in the U. S. instead of Berlin, saw Grand Hotel, she had reason to be pleased with the adaptation of her play. Said she: "My admiration for Greta Garbo is unbounded. ... I see before me even now her tired, tragic face in the opening scenes and her extraordinary vivacity of expression and action as the happy Grusinskaya." It is a quick, sharp melodrama far superior to imitations of it already produced (Transatlantic, Union Depot, Hotel Continental). Edmund Goulding's direction is brilliant but the picture's greatest virtue, as it should be, is its acting. Garbo is less numb than usual and gives her best performance. John Barrymore makes the Baron a scapegrace so admirable as to be a larger blot upon the escutcheon of the Hays organization than six gangsters. Lionel Barrymore makes you believe that his collar is an inch too big for him. Good shot : the lobby of the Grand Hotel, looking down from a balcony on the sixth floor.

Destry Rides Again (Universal). Tom Mix rode a horse in the Spanish-American War long enough to get shot in the mouth. Subsequently he took minor roles in minor skirmishes with Chinese, Mexicans, Boers. For a time he served as a U. S. deputy marshal in Colorado. In 1910, when moving pictures were still flickering violently, he was offered $150 a week to appear in Selig films. Followed, mostly for Fox, some 180 Wild Westerns with 100 more or less leading ladies playing opposite him. Actor Mix retired from screen work in 1926, traveled abroad with his horse, returned to join Sells-Floto Circus at a salary reputedly $15,000 per week. Besides his circus appearances, his newsworthy activities have since included getting divorced by Mrs. Victoria Forde Mix, who charged mental cruelty, "loudness in public," pistol twirling; getting sued for $13,000 by one John Berress of Minneapolis, who charged that while drunk Mix grappled with him, shook a large fist; getting sued by Col. Zack T. Miller for alleged jumping of a contract with Miller's now defunct 101 Ranch Circus; nearly dying from peritonitis following an appendectomy; marrying one Mabel Hubbell Ward.

Whatever the vagaries of his private life, Mix's screen life has been impeccable. He has never been shown smoking, drunk, or disorderly beyond the usual rowdiness of a film-land cowboy. Destry Rides Again remains true to the Mix tradition. And if it were not the first of six Mix talking pictures which Universal is to produce, all preceded by loud publicity, one might suspect that Producer Carl Laemmle Jr. constructed Destry Rides Again with his tongue in his cheek. Containing all the old trappings of silent pre-War Westerns, with a main street, a saloon entitled "The Golden Girl," a stage coach holdup, fast riding accompanied by studio clatter of horses' hoofs, it has the original plot about the hero running for sheriff, who is double-crossed by his supposed friends, with Right flourishing at the finish.

Tom Mix's comeback at 52 is not likely to excite anyone except small boys in the villages, where they give away 10-c- Mix cowboy hats to early comers at the show.

This is the Night (Paramount). It is possible that when Director Ernst Lubitsch was hesitating to sign his new contract, Paramount's production chiefs thought it might be expedient to have a second-string Lubitsch ready. Frank Tuttle certainly directed this one in the Lubitsch manner. He even uses a Lubitsch touch at the very beginning when a lady (Thelma Todd) gets her evening gown caught in the door of a limousine and the crowd on the sidewalk turns the incident into a song--"Madame Has Lost Her Dress." The song runs through the rest of the picture and helps to give it the light-hearted mood necessary to make an old plot seem fresh and more than one old joke seem funny.

What actually happens is unimportant. Roland Young, whose cinema career has been a succession of embarrassing situations, is this time embarrassed when, discovered with the lady who lost her dress by her husband, a javelin-thrower. A friend (Charles Ruggles) tries to help Young out by saying that he is married. Young is therefore forced to dig up a girl (Lily Damita) to pose as his wife. Both couples and the friend set off for Venice where, as anticipated, Young and Lily Damita are last seen drifting inseparably in a gondola. Even better than the idea of proving that Lubitsch is not inimitable was the idea of teaming Ruggles and Young. A cloudy alcoholic petulance sometimes mars their friendship. Young says: "I will tear you down and put up an office building where you used to stand."

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