The New Pictures

Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall.

Most of the outstanding feature pictures of the year, such as D. W. Griffith's American and Douglas Fairbanks' The Thief of Bagdad, have made much of mad horse-rides over the scenery. It causes no surprise, then, when Mary Pickford, in her latest vehicle joins the scamper academy of screendom. She plunges ahead in a wild gallop that would do credit to Paul Revere. In fact, suspicion even obtrudes that it is not always Mary herself performing the athletic equestrian feats that are an honor to the Fairbanks family.

The picture in indeed a family affair. Lottie Pickford, absent from the screen for several years, plays devoted handmaiden to her sister, while Allan Forrest, Lottie's husband, portrays the gallant lover who rescues noble Dorothy from the intriguing circle that would marry her off in the approved fashion of historical drama. Mary undertook the play, as she expressed it, to save herself from "being strangled in her own curls." More dramatic than usual, she has several powerful scenes with Clare Eames, who plays her favorite role of Queen Elizabeth with versatile sinuosity, as one born to make history. A resplendent cast help to make this Mary's best picture, culled from the novel by Charles Major, current standby whenever an array of costumes on the screen is hooked together into a drama. It sags a little at first, but the settings and photography are superb, and Mary looks more beautiful than nature itself.

Why Men Leave Home. If you want to be friends with your wife, divorce her. That is the general notion of this screen adaptation for Avery Hopwood's play, done so well by Lewis Stone, Helme Chadwick and Mary Carr that at times it suggests Lubitsch's The Marriage Circle. Mr. Hopwood has again used to advantage his favorite device of bringing an estranged husband and wife together in a quarantined house, and for once the obvious tag moral is so well put that it arouses mirth rather than wrath.

Between Friends. A rather machine-made story of artists' life, in which Lou Tellegen is represented as hypnotizing a "friend" (who stole his wife) to commit suicide on Christmas eve, and then hypnotizing him out of it, by sheer power of the Tellegen will and smoldering eyes. A high spot is a Greenwich Village ball, in which great fun prevails when one of the revelers spanks the others with a waiter's tray.