The New Pictures

The Doctor's Secret (Paramount) is Sir James M. Barrie's one-act play Half an Hour done as a talking-picture which sticks to the original script in all respects except that Barrie's play ran the time specified by its title whereas The Doctor's Secret runs for 60 minutes. The story of the woman who lives through that half--hour-30 minutes from the time she leaves her husband to run away with another man, until, her sweetheart having been killed in a street accident when he went out to get a taxi to take them to the station, she is back as hostess in her husband's house--could not possibly be told so well without the sound device. For once, the voices, in spite of still imperfect reproduction, give life to the characterizations--H. B. Warner's Englishman, Ruth Chatterton's faithless wife. Best shot: Miss Chatterton on the sofa making up her mind.

Ruth Chatterton, brought from the theatre for sound-cinema, has a long jaw, sly eyes and a good voice. When she was 14 she quit Mrs. Hazen's school at Pelham Manor, N. Y., to join a stock company playing in Washington, D. C. Later she supported Lowell Sherman, Pauline Lord, Lenore Ulric. She translated La Tendresse from the French, produced it herself and played the lead. She was in The Devil's Plum Tree in Los Angeles when Emil Jannings requested that she take a screen test, and picked her for Sins of the Fathers. She says she likes riding and swimming, but she stays indoors a lot. She spends her holidays in France but has never acted there. Her next sound-film will be The Dummy.

Captain Lash (Fox). Victor McLaglen takes the same kind of parts as George Bancroft but is a little bigger, better natured and less impressive. When a crazy fireman knocks open a steam valve in the stokehole where he works, McLaglen gets hurt rescuing Claire Windsor who has come down there with a party of passengers being shown around the ship. Does that girl make goo-goo eyes? Yes, she does make goo-goo eyes. Is she smuggling diamonds? Yes, she's smuggling diamonds. Three or four years ago a film photographed, acted, plotted as effectively as this would have been called, inaccurately, a masterpiece. Audiences who saw it last week thought it was a fair program picture. Best shot: the little stoker (Clyde Cook) playing the accordion.

The Broadway Melody (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), is a tedious musical comedy embedded in a routine story like a fly in celluloid. Three theme songs, a tenor voice, tap-dancing, and a few memorable bodies, do little to justify the publicity bought for this picture before its openings everywhere, publicity of a frenzied quality rare even in these days when a smoke of expensive adjectives issues in advance from every cinematic fire, however small. Now and then, as one member (Bessie Love) of a team of vaudeville sisters, in love with her partner's fiance (Charles King),makes theatrical and eventually frustrated gestures toward self-sacrifice, you see how Director Beaumont has tried casually and hastily to achieve the authenticity of certain stage productions of similar subject matter. The best element is Bessie Love. Though limited by her lines, this oldtime and of late not very conspicuous star gives one of the finest speaking performances thus far.

Naughty Baby (First National). It would have taken an actress to make convincing this scenario about a check-girl who pretends to be a debutante from Boston to win the love of a young man who pretends to be a millionaire. Alice White is not an actress. Alice White is a size-fourteen girl who looks like Clara Bow, but cuter; all eyes and no chin. She loses her bathing suit; she rides a horse for the first time; the rest is pretty stupid.