New Pictures

The Understanding Heart (Joan Crawford, Francis X. Bushman Jr.) is so befuddled that it is incomprehensible. It has less merit, even, than the original novel by Peter B. Kyne. The director succeeds in trapping in a forest fire a loose woman, an escaped convict who had been unjustly jailed for murder, a beautiful heroine, a virile ranger, a simple sheriff and a clown. As the flames threaten doom, confessions are in order. Comes an airplane in the sky, dropping parachutes, with which the little group is saved by jumping over a cliff.

Annie Laurie (Lillian Gish). Heather-bred Scotsmen had best avoid this Hollywood version of bloody feuds in the Highlands. Hollywood handsomes in kilts are, all too plainly, still Hollywood handsomes. The flutter-armed, whitefaced Miss Gish is no braw Scotch lassie. Lurid effects of green moustaches and blue foliage enliven the colored shots. In Manhattan, the film is another of those so-called "long run" features that charge legitimate theatre prices for no apparent reason.

The Love Thrill (Laura La Plante, Bryant Washburn, Tom Moore). An insurance saleslady masquerades as the widow of a supposedly deceased big game hunter. Her game: to sell a fat policy to a plutocrat. Complication ensues when the hunter turns up for dinner with the plutocrat, wearing wilderness whiskers and a new name. In the finished com-pany of the Messrs. Washburn and Moore, Miss La Plante's dimpled blondness appears to great and amusing advantage.

Convoy (Lowell Sherman, Dorothy Mackaill). Destroyers riding the moiling waves like unruly hunters, great ships shivering to the touch of torpedoes and keeling over into waiting sea graves, are the irreproachable chief actors of this potent inducement to join the Navy. But any sailor would deplore the squishily melodramatic story that wanders over the brine-- a U. S. society girl tracking down a flowery German spy with considerable damage to her reputation.

Senorita (Bebe Daniels, William Powell). By inviolable tradition every Hollywood comedienne must occasionally don trousers. Here, with uncommon credibility and unbelievable agility Miss Daniels plays both a seductive female and a Fairbanksian, dueling male. The diverting, rapid story is concerned with a cattle-stealing feud between two South American clans.

The Claw (Norman Kerry, Claire Windsor). Britishers, wearing rather respectable clothes, are put into situations intended to be dramatic, among a tribe of prancing, tom-tomming South African cannibals.