New Pictures

The Enemies of Women. A magnificently spectacular adaptation of Ibanez' novel. Lionel Barrymore heads an excellent cast. The trouble with the picture is that there is too much of it. Some of it is gripping, but it is smothered under an enormous mass of rubbish. Where the Pavement Ends. Alice Terry and Ramon Navarro help make this a good picture. Rex Ingram's direction does make it an extraordinary one. The story, from John Russell's The Passion Vine, is of the daughter of a South Sea missionary, starving for love. For want of anything better, she becomes involved with a young native chieftain and starts to elope with him. He carries her down a waterfall--a thrilling scene. At the bottom, they find that the boats they had expected to find have been taken. He leaves her to get others. A storm comes up. She feels that she is committing an error, and crawls back. The native kills a brutal trader to whom her father was going to marry her, and she tells him that she cannot go with him. He kills himself. The whole story is told without heroics, without sentimentality, with a rich and mysterious beauty. It is a masterpiece. Safety Last. Harold Lloyd is one of the very few who can be laughed at in the same breath as the mighty Chaplin. So it is annoying to have him spoil it all in his first seven-reel picture by falling back on a succession of cheap spectacularisms for much of his effect. Glimpses of the Moon. Money, you learn, is a comparatively essential factor to social success. The impecunious novelist and his impecunious spouse find their marital journeyings about the aristocratic globe are bringing them perilously near shipwreck. A little money arriving at the critical moment, however, saves the situation, and they don't get divorced after all. Bebe Daniels makes the wife as attractive as her part permits, and Nita Naldi is a convincing seductress. The picture differs from Edith Wharton's novel only in plot, spirit and quality. The best recent picture--possibly the best in history--continues to be The Covered Wagon, epic of the plains and the hardy travelers of the Oregon Trail three-quarters of a century ago.