The New Pictures

I Cover the Waterfront (United Artists) exhibits a new way to smuggle Chinese houseboys into San Diego: in the stomachs of large sharks, whose mouths are propped open so that their inmates can breathe. This sordid aid to immigration is devised in I Cover the Waterfront by a grizzled old fishing captain, Eli Kirk (Ernest Torrence). It is discovered and reported to the authorities by a brisk and bibulous journalist (Ben Lyon) who is in love with Kirk's daughter, Julie (Claudette Colbert). The difficulties you might expect in a situation of this sort arise promptly: a Coast Guard officer shoots Kirk, who shoots the reporter who, when he gets out of the hospital, marries Julie. Far from the tenor of the book by Max Miller, from which it was adapted by Wells Root, I Cover the Waterfront is a sullen atmospheric melodrama, interesting except in banal sequences which show the reporter abusing his managing editor.

Sewing Chinese coolie's into sharks was characteristic of the cinema activities of the late Ernest Torrence who died last fortnight after an operation for gallstones (TIME, May 22). He massacred Indians in The Covered Wagon, kidnapped children in Peter Pan and; as Professor Moriarity, almost did away with Sherlock Holmes. When he was a young man, Ernest Torrence planned to be a musician. He wrote the music for a play called The Lady from Lyons, was first baritone for the Savoy Opera Company in London. His lanky 6-ft. 4-in. physique, tufted eyebrows, gargoyle nose and prickly Scotch burr soon made him a popular, villain. His first cinema, in 1912, was a talkie: an experimental version of Faust made at the Edison laboratories. His whiskers became really famed in the U. S. after Tol'able David, in which he was a Kentucky feudist with a homicidal mania. When he heard that $1,000 salaries for actors were common in Hollywood; Ernest Torrence said: "Talk like that makes a Scotchman intoxicated." He had just completed I Cover the Waterfront, started home to visit his brothers in Edinburgh when he died. Critics considered his posthumous performance one of his finest.

Peg O' My Heart (Cosmopolitan) gives Marion Davies a chance to say "Wurra-wurra" and wear her hair in pigtails, the accepted procedure for actresses who, in this strangely enduring sentimental comedy, revive the role which Laurette Taylor originated in 1912. The play deals, as everyone knows, with an old Irish fisherman, the antithesis of the savage angler in I Cover the Waterfront (see above), and his daughter who inherits -L-2,000,000. With her small mongrel Michael, she goes to England to live in a manor house where she squabbles with the butler, falls in love with a young solicitor, is informed that her father is dead. By the time this report is exploded, she has learned enough about the depraved habits of the aristocracy to scuttle happily back to Ireland.

Efforts to modernize the play by such devices as a radio-equipped roadster, which Peg drives into a pond, are a failure. The most convincing element in Peg O' My Heart is Miss Davies' pardonable affection for her own brogue, which sometimes causes her to speak as though she had a live mackerel under her tongue. Typical shot: Peg's father. Pat (J. Farrell MacDonald) when he sees that she is downcast, advising her to appeal to the Wee Folk.

Adorable (Fox) rhymes with "deplorable" in the pretty little waltz that Lieutenant Conradi (Henry Garat) sings to the Princess Marie Christine (Janet Gaynor) when they meet, both in disguise, at a servants' ball. Neither adjective suits the picture. It is certainly inoffensive, but charming only if you admire the dimple in Miss Gaynor's chin, the wrinkles in her nose and her habit of speaking as though she were a small child impersonating a grownup. Her new leading man--considerably more civilized than Charles Farrell--looks like Maurice Chevalier without the lower lip, has the same type of accent and a similar light tenor voice, suitable for bedchamber music. Son of a French boulevard comedian, Henry Garat made a reputation dancing with Mistinguette at the Casino de Paris. He was one of the two stars of Congress Dances who were imported last summer by Fox. The other, Lilian Harvey, has not yet made her first U. S. picture.

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