The New Pictures

Homecoming. If you were told that this picture tells of the return of two soldiers, one married and one unmarried, and how the unmarried one gets home first and goes up the winding stairs to the door which the wife of the other opens for him, you would think of "Enoch Arden" or foresee at least the old pattern of passion, quarrel, and reconciliation. And since all stories are old stories, the pattern you foresaw is here, but since some never become familiar you would hardly foresee the patient, particular realism which makes this German "Enoch Arden" into living, modern truth, or guess the force of the emotion shaping the layers of incident to an ending stripped of grandiloquence. Struggling to get out of Siberia, the two comrades (there are only three people in the cast) thirst in a desert composed obviously of flour, shavings, and papier-mache; their thirst, however, is real, their momentary, flaring hatreds, their gestures toward heroism, renunciation, their final acceptance of themselves, all these are real, surviving buoyantly the inadequacies of mechanics. Director Joe May, Actor Lars Hanson, maintain the fact, recently put to question by shoddy productions, that Hollywood may have bought most of the talent of the UFA company but has not yet bought all the brains. Dita Parlo 13 the girl to whom the soldiers return; she has both brains and beauty.

Gang War.* No gangster taking part in the crime-wave of the cinema has undergone a more amazing reformation than the one who, holding the rose his sweetheart has given him, is mowed down by pistol bullets while rescuing her innocent lover from the rival gang. Yet in spite of its frail conclusion and the inevitable echoes of the shots which, fired in the play Broadway, were heard round the world, this picture begins with a good idea: two reporters go to a dance-hall hostess who has the dope about the innocent boy's love affair with a little cabaret girl (Olive Borden). What she tells one of the reporters, constitutes the plot of a well-acted, fairly exciting picture proving principally that Olive Borden is a better actress than most people have believed. Best shot: New Year's day in San Francisco's Chinatown.

*No connection with the Willard Mack "legit"-drama of the same name.