The New Pictures

The Signal Tower. Simple, straightforward roles, played without a flourish, directed by anyone with some feeling for proportion and suspense, make passable pictures. Run them off in a mountainous, shaggy, backwoods setting, make Wallace Beery the villain, Rockcliffe Fellowes the hero, Virginia Valli the heroine, and you may turn out the best deep-chested melodrama of the year. That is what Director Clarence Brown did, the story chosen being that of an honest, overalled signalman and his wife, whose hair-raising vicissitudes, domestic and vocational, are caused by a hulking railroad sheik. Punished once for snatching kisses, this sheik chooses a stormy night for his revenge. Runaway freight cars endanger the Limited, occupy the signalman, give time for the resheiking of the signalman's brave wife. The wreck is a weak fake, but fighting, business, and minor characters all swell the picture's score.

Bread. A soggy, tasteless adaptation of the novel by Charles G. Norris, leavened only by an improvement in the acting of Mae Busch. Mr. Norris, to encourage home-life and the patter of tiny feet, drew a penny-scrimping stenographer to whom marriage was bliss at first, then mere unbearable penny-scrimping. She left her husband, never went back, was sorry ever after. On the screen she comes gushing back for the usual reconciliatory osculation. Never were worse subtitles committed.

Behold This Woman. Another picture of Hollywood, by Hollywood, for Hollywood. All points of interest in the story are seen as in real life, except, of course, the characters. It is good to know that they are only acting, for Irene Rich, as a sophisticated screen queen, breaks down in her car among the hills, drops in on Charles Post (as Stephen Strange-way, hillman), lets herself in for his strong-man love. He does not recover until there has been displayed a good deal of vamping, counter-vamping, and ancient details of the Hollywood "sugar-papa" system. The scenario was lifted from the quivering pages of E. Phillips Oppenheim, but Charles Post's abdomen and eyebrows are as depressing as ever.

The Sideshow of Life. If cinema-wrights had not so low an opinion of the vocabularies of moviegoers, they might have called this picture The Mountebank after W. J. Locke's story which it dramatized. Ernest Torrence, as the Mountebank, plays all the chords of Locke's sentimentalism as clown and brigadier general in worthy re-creation of the intinerant romance.