New Pictures

Wings (Clara Bow, Charles Rogers, Richard Arlen). For propaganda purposes, the U. S. War Department cooperated generously with Paramount in making this picture drama of the skies. U. S. planes are filmed darting against German foes. Clouds below look like white flocks. Only after a ship has started its crazy dive to death do the tiny earth patches rush up to define themselves as gaping scraps of No Man's Land.

Bruce Armstrong (Richard Arlen) after a fall disentangles himself from his battered machine, forced down behind the enemy lines. He steals an enemy plane, wings his way toward his own camp. Meanwhile, his true friend, John Powell (Charles Rogers), hearing that Bruce has been shot down by the Germans, sallies forth, Achilles-like, to demolish Germania for its destruction of his Patroclus. His sputtering machine-gun bespeaks grim, relentless rage. Prussian planes careen downward, leaving swift trails of smoke. Sausage-shaped dirigibles collapse in flames, Armstrong in the German plane flies joyously toward his heroic friend but is not recognized. With volleys of oaths bursting from his mouth and volleys of bullets coursing from his gun, Powell shoots down the comrade whom he thought he was avenging.

Among other aviators, Commander Richard E. Byrd offered unsolicited praise to Jesse Lasky for the faithful realism with which the air maneuvers were pictured. The audience gulped down the plot as conventional but reliable stuff, watched with waning interest while spinning, swerving, dodging planes grew into confused monotony against a background of unpicturesque ether. Adam and Evil. Lew Cody plays both Adam Trevelyan and Adam's twin brother, Allan. Adam has wealth and a wife (Aileen Pringle); Allan is possessed of liabilities and a gold digger (Gwen Lee). The two women cannot tell the brothers apart, so one woman's husband becomes another woman's prey. Meanwhile Adam's wife, termed by the subtitle writer "his spare rib," almost floats to the wrong bosom.

Topsy and Eva. Herein the Duncan Sisters are seen but not heard. The roguish one (Rosetta) plays Topsy, who flees all over snow-bound Kentucky chased by ogrish Simon Legree with his snapping whip. Vivian, the beautiful one, plays Little Eva, who flaps her white eyelids to see such sport. It appears to be a vehicle for Rosetta's clowning and as such compares unfavorably with her similar performances in vaudeville.

The Satin Woman (Mrs. Wallace Reed). The heroine is a Mother. In order to save her daughter from a cabaret sheik, she vamps the man herself. This is doubly effective strategy, for it succeeds in recapturing the interest of her own husband, who has been straying toward a passionate brunette. When the entire family has been corralled, Mother gives up the fashion shows and night clubs to return to the hearth. Thus the dumpling of Virtue is set, though not obtrusively, upon the hotcakes of Hollywood.