The New Pictures

The Shock Punch. The unaccountable disinclination of a young lady of "society" to marry a prize fighter twisted this hero's life all out of shape. It pretty well interrupted the plot of the cinema and threw the action up on the bony heights of a rising skyscraper. From there followed reels reminiscent of Harold Lloyd's Safety Last--a considerable amount of entertainment. Of course the prize fighter wasn't really a prize fighter, nor was he an iron worker on the dizzy girders. He was a millionaire in disguise. But a millionaire can fall off a narrow steel beam as fast as the next man. The picture made its point. Richard Dix is acceptable as the young man. Frances Howard, who recently married Samuel Goldwyn amid excited publicity, seemed rather slight and spiritless. The Talker. This ponderous project indicates that, even if a woman must yearn for a career, she must not talk about it around the family fireside. This wife talked and put bad ideas into one young lady's head which did her no good; the husband was nearly snared by a stenographer. Many expensive actors were wasted on all this--Lewis Stone, Anna Q. Nilsson, Shirley Mason and Ian Keith--and a lot of terrible subtitles, such as: "You are my wife and I know you are clean to the core." Up the Ladder. One more atrocity is perpetrated. It is the old story of the sacrificing wife who makes her husband famous only to find that he is deserting her for a fuzzy-headed female down the block. She finds it out by means of a telephone he has invented, which includes a reflector in which you can see the person you are talking to. The acting is rather unpleasant and the total adds up minus.

The Sporting Venus. Blanche Sweet retains much of her old charm though her glory of appearance has departed. She is in this endeavor cast as a hard-riding Lady somebody-or-other from Scotland. Her love lies at the feet of a young commoner and is brusquely seized and hurled toward a wicked Prince from the Balkans. The Prince nearly gets her until she discovers that he has been betting with her large estates which he never possessed. Back comes the commoner, rich and forgiving. Ronald Colman in the latter part again indicates his great possibilities.