The New Pictures

The Denial. Claire Windsor is the latest to succumb to the current screen fashion of portraying, in one film, a young girl in her teens, and a woman of 45, thus putting screen art above mere good looks. In her latter manifestation, she dreams herself back to her girlhood stifled by her mother-living again the romance of the Spanish-American War, learning not to cramp her own daughter's style of loving. Lewis Beach's stage play, The Square Peg, here transferred to the screen, has had some of the acrid tang carefully sponged out of it. But enough remains to vitalize this study of the ironbound mother determined to be good to her family, let the chips fall where they may.

Introduce Me. Douglas MacLean takes his smile for an airing on the Alps. As in his earlier picture, The Hottentot, Mr. MacLean is again a timid young man harried into rash deeds for the sake of a maiden fair. Constructed along formulistic lines, his gallivanting around the dizzy cliffs yet has its comic urge.

On Thin Ice. The crook world has a woman's pure love showered on it again. This cinema unfolds the manner in which an artful dodger, Tom Moore by name, has his seedy character disinfected by artless Edith Roberts. To regain some lost bank loot through her, a gang of robbers plant Moore in her confidence as her long-lost brother--and romance becomes imperative. Still, it's much better than it sounds.

The Isle of Vanishing Men. Again, a savage island picture, the most glamorous part of which is its title. The cannibals revealed in it, a prey to the devouring diseases of civilization, are akin to Barnum's dog-faced man. Their vanishing, from the samples shown here, will not make them missed. Wildly advertised orgies have been emasculated, till all that remains is a form of nocturnal shimmying by the tribe.

The Goose Hangs High. Another transcription of a Lewis Beach play, this picture is primarily notable for the appearance over the Hollywood horizon of Constance Bennett, daughter of Richard Bennett. She shows much promise, fertile grace and panomimic adaptability. The burden of the story is well sustained on the screen, to wit, that if you but scratch the brass of the heedless young brood of today, you'll find true gold.