The New Pictures

While the City Sleeps. Because Underworld, crook cinema written by Ben Hecht, made record returns for Paramount a few months ago, hundreds of hideaways, spitting gats, Big Boys, molls, bulls, rods, and mobs have been photographed. Now Lon Chaney as a very plainclothes detective with bunions strides painfully through a convincing picture about bad men and a good girl.

While the city sleeps, the cops play pinochle in the assembly room and gangsters croak a jeweler on East 37th Street, Manhattan. On the trail of "Mile-Away" Healey, undertaker, suspected murderer, gang-leader, move the swollen feet of Detective Chancy. His face, which successfully suggests the face of an experienced bloodhound, looks through the window of a lunchroom wherein Mile-Away is quarreling with a recent mistress; the same face pushes out of a coffin in Mile-Away's funeral parlors and later appears suddenly in a dark corner of a fur store which Mile-Away's gang is robbing. This face is dear to an aging Irish landlady but not to Myrtle, the girl Mile-Away and Detective Chaney mutually admire.

In a series of tense sequences, finely directed and photographed, the story moves to the scene in which the inevitable machine rifle volleys death from a second-story window at the gang attempting a getaway. But the gang differs from past cinema gangs in that its members are not millionaires but needy-looking fellows; the good girl would certainly have been bad if she hadn't been watched.

This is the fourth straight make-up part played this year by Actor Chaney who in the past has used hideous disguises. Now nearing 50, Actor Chaney likes his relatives to call him Alonzo, his real name. He has a married son and has himself been in the show business for 30 years, first in a singing stock company in Colorado Springs, then as a legit-actor touring the Middle West in comedy, tragedy and operetta, and subsequently as wardrobe man, property man, chorus man, transportation agent, scenery-shifter (for Mansfield, Mojeska, Mantell), tourist guide, interior decorator, before his first cinema appearance as an extra in a wild west two-reeler. His face had been smeared with pie in many slapsticks when a director selected it to be a crook-cripple's in The Miracle Man. Alonzo Chaney's present salary, kept secret by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, is thought to be about $4,000 per week.

Three Comrades and 1 Invention is the first sample of Russian humor ever presented in the U. S. in cinema. The three comrades, one big, one little male and one, Olga Tretlakova, lusty and white-toothed female with no waistline, used an invention for making boxes as the mechanism for laughing at inventions, manufacturers, the Soviet government, country life. And U. S. audiences laughed at humor in the style of Gogol as heartily as in the past they have laughed at humor in the style of Sennett.

Kriemhild's Revenge, sequel to Siegfried, shown in the U. S. in 1925, tells how Siegfried's widow goes looking through a world of half-gods for someone who will avenge the murder of her husband. In settings like the metaphors of an epic poet the story moves to its climax in the hall of Attila, king of the earth, where the last of the Niebelungs sing their death-song under the burning roof. With a sound accompaniment this picture, the last made in the UFA studios before Hollywood companies bought up their talent, would be a novel and supreme form of grand opera.

Battle of the Sexes. Fifteen years ago D. W. Griffith presented a picture called The Battle of the Sexes starring Dorothy Gish, now refilmed with modern casts and setting and the original story of a businessman harassed by a professional sweetheart and a tearful wife. Bedroom antics by Don Alvarado and the squirmings on a cushioned floor of Miss Phyllis Haver's stomach supplied an element which kept fingers busy in the box-offices of theatres which showed this picture last week.