New Pictures

A Regular Fellow. Raymond Griffith is rapidly rising dangerously near the position of leading light comedian of the screen. In this description he must be carefully distinguished from Mr. Chaplin, Mr. Lloyd and Mr. Keaton, who are specialists rather in slapstick.

In the present opus Mr. Griffith fools around with a European kingdom, chases an American girl all over Europe, runs into a nasty revolution. Most of these things have been done before--most recently by Eric von Stroheim's The Merry Widow.

Thank You. John Golden's home town idyl of a minister and his flapper visitor from Paris is hereby done over for the Cinema. With Alec Francis as the minister, Jacqueline Logan as the girl, and George O'Brien as the man she marries, it makes good routine amusement. Never a great drama for the intellectuals, it has been further boiled down for movie fans.

Exchange of Wives. And here is where the screen has put its foot into a trap again. Marriage is a matter too complicated for the stunted treatment accorded to nearly every screen play. Yet films on marriage persist. They must have a box office value, but it is the impression of many people that pictures of gilded vice and of marriages that do not jell are chiefly responsible for the low esteem in which the Cinema is held by many sensible folk--so grotesque, so cheap, so shriekingly impossible are the Hollywood conceptions of these same sensible people in domestic difficulties. In this case one wife could cook and was cold; the other had an overabundance of feelings but no craft at biscuit-baking. Their husbands exchanged. Then nobody was happy.