New Pictures

Old San Francisco (Dolores Costello). With her proud father she dwells on the sunny, ivy-grown rancho of the Vasquez family, who founded San Francisco. There she might have breathed rose-laden zephyrs and married Terrence O'Shaughnessy (Charles Mack) but for Buckwell (Warner Oland), villainous politician. He wants to take away her rancho. Because she senses that, despite appearances, this wretch is a Mongolian, he carries her off to the most devilish abyss in old Chinatown, "the inner circle of the mile of hell." There, on the point of worse than death, it occurs to her to repeat the Lord's Prayer. In answer, God sends the earthquake of 1906 to demolish the villain.

The eccentricities of the bad man are noteworthy. He worships weird, heathen deities while masquerading as a Caucasian Christian. He knows secret trap doors, cells, torture chambers, depraved henchmen. He keeps a dwarf brother locked up in a stifling cage. In short, he inspires the belief that if anything can be more astonishing than the cinema version of virtue, it is its conception of vice.

Alias the Deacon (Jean Hersholt). As in the play of the same name, the hero's occupation is fleecing the wicked rich to invest the righteous poor. An angel-faced cardsharp, he blandly deals his opponents four nines, a flush, a straight, a full house, only to stagger the crowd by slapping down a royal straight flush for his own account, thus taking the largest poker pot ever staked in that town. With the proceeds he raises a mortgage, facilitates a wedding, stores up treasure in Heaven. Then he ambles into a box car and shuffles off to other good crookedness. Jean Hersholt makes him an engaging bum.

Madame Wants No Children is a German treatment of a French foible. That it bubbles without fuming is gratifying to audiences who are waiting to see Herr Alexander Korda (director) and Frau Marie Corda (actress)* in a forthcoming screen version of The Private Life of Helen of Troy. The heroine of Madame Wants No Children is a newlywed French wife whom the bleak sphinx, Venetian gondolas and an uxorious spouse cannot dislodge from night clubs. Even at home in Paris her life is a succession of jazz blares, pale lights and glittering stuffed shirts. Eventually, however, she joggles down to productive domesticity, mindful that when Baby does arrive, she will have her own night club.

Ritzy (Betty Bronson). Elinor Glyn, with whom the public mind associates The Philosophy of Love and the theory of IT,/- here takes hold of an unusually refreshing bit of froth, only to flatten it with her usual pomposity. The heroine, a little Miss Main Street, is infatuated with the-idea of marrying a duke. Only after she has been taught the error of her snobbish ways and given an opportunity to register truly philosophic passion under half-closed eyelids, does she discover that her fiance, Mr. Smith, is in reality the Duke of Westborough. Thereupon, morality and the sugar plum go down together.

Time to Love (Raymond Griffith). While making love in a rowboat that bobs on the edge of a fall, fighting duels for the Marquis de Daddo, and engaging in picturesque stunts that have little plot cohesion, Raymond Griffith manages to appear nonchalantly amusing.

Framed (Milton Sills). Through error the hero is dishonorably discharged from the French Army. He goes to Brazilian diamond mines to forget. Through a second kick by Fortune, he is accused falsely of stealing jewels. After reels of strong, silent endurance, he saves the mine-owner's daughter from mud floods that trap them in an underground passageway.

*Though man and wife, Herr Korda and Frau Corda spell their names differently.

/-Mme. Glyn originally designated the quality of IT. In April, 1926, Wilella Waldorf, cinema critic of the New York Evening Post, haphazardly ascribed the Quality to Aileen Pringle, cinemactress. Came a pontifical note from Mme. Glyn's secretary notifying Miss Waldorf that while Miss Pringle is considered by Mme. Glyn a lovely little lady, she is not on the official IT list. Only the following are on the list: Douglas Fairbanks, John Gilbert, Gloria Swanson, Vilma Banky, and Rex the Wild Horse. According to most recent advices, Clara Bow has been added.