The New Pictures

The Enemy. Two years ago in Manhattan, Playwright Charming Pollock offered theatre-goers a play whose purpose was to prove the too-often demonstrated assertion that War is Hell. Transposed now to the more extensive medium of the cinema, The Enemy monotonously but accurately hammers the nail of that assertion into the stout oak of the public intelligence.

The story is that of a young Austrian who is roused from his wedding breakfast by the call to arms. His bride waits for him, trying to find money with which to buy food for herself and her baby, her mind always a battlefield of fears and sorrows. At last the young lieutenant who is supposed to have been killed, reappears for a conclusion that weakens, somewhat, the effect of the picture's sound and peaceful propaganda.

Brilliant direction by Fred Niblo does much to whip up a story that is pulling a heavy wagon of argument. But most of the credit for making The Enemy an engrossing and beautiful moving picture must go to Actress Lillian Gish, in the role of the wife whom war has robbed. Now 29, Actress Gish appeared on the stage for the first time when she was 4 years old at a salary of $10 weekly. Now she has $8000 a week, a police-dog, a canary, a gluttonous appetite for licorice candy, and a reputation for frail, goldenhaired beauty that has suggested, in a recent popular song, this recipe for exceptional loveliness: "Put Cleopatra into a dish, add a dash of Lillian Gish."

The Gay Defender is none other than Richard Dix, wearing a warm coat of California tan. An inevitably charming and good-natured outlaw, he cracks his long whip, shoots, stabs as if he were playing the role of a contemporary gangster instead of Joaquin Murrietta whose career was a trail of blood, bullets, alcohol and love for a pure sweet girl through the days of '49. There is no need to fear that Jake Hamby and his gang will be spry enough to catch and hang so gallant a jack, although they make violent efforts to do so.

Silk Legs is a technical term for those grotesque and abbreviated limbs on which stocking drummers display their flimsy wares. The drummer in this case is Madge Bellamy, and as such she is successful enough to surpass the sales records of her rival who is also her lover. Actress Bellamy, moreover, is herself a not unsatisfactory stuffing for cloaks, suits, stockings.

A Hero for a Night. This is one more airy and erratic farce which tries not very successfully to add to current aeronautical excitement. The plot concerns an easygoing taxicab driver and a thieving millionaire who head their plane for the Manhattan Stock Exchange and arrive, with surprising ease, in Russia. This funny & heroic feat enables the taxicab driver to marry the millionaire's daughter.

The Love Mart. Incredibly enough, the villain of this picture suspects the heroine, whose skin is as white as her well-bleached character, of being an octoroon. The only reasonable basis for such a suspicion is found in the fact that she lives in New Orleans in the days when slave traders brought their boats to harbor and when a young sprig of the aristocracy could still win a barbershop in a duel. Flourishing his razors with vigor and precision, this young sprig is able to compel the ogrish slave trader to remove the stogie from his thick lips and to admit that he has been dealing from the bottom of a cold pack of lies. Against an almost bibulously romantic setting of wharves, iron balustrades, blackamoors and grandes dames, Actress Billie Dove softly, sweetly flutters her little wings.

Taras Bulba is a striking proof that in Poland, at least, the manufacture of motion pictures is an infant industry. It contains, however, some good specimens of the medieval Cossacks.

Night Life. Even amid the beer gardens of Austria, the love of a good woman will make a conjuring pickpocket go straight. With Johnny Harron in the leading role, this famed fatuity is illustrated as clumsily as ever before.

Man Crazy. Dorothy Mackaill frolics about in riding habits, in abbreviated dresses and behind a lunch counter. She shocks her grandmother, scares away bootleggers with a gun, and plays about with the cinematic ideal of a college boy, impersonated by Jack Mulhall.