The New Pictures

The Time, the Place and the Girl

(Warner). This story is taken from a musical comedy popular several years ago --something about a football player who had gone into the bond business, and his boss, and the boss's wife, and his secretary. There were good tunes in it; you heard them wherever you went to dance that summer. The tunes are gone from this version, also the chorus with big hats and little parasols, but the musical comedy atmosphere is left, inconsequential and agreeable. Before the football player has married the secretary and escaped the trap the boss was laying for him, you have stopped paying attention without having stopped enjoying it. Director Bretherton arranged the story very smoothly. Betty Compson, and an unknown, dark-haired young man named Grant Withers play opposite each other. Assorted sound-shots: a crowd at a football game, a college dance where everyone sings, a stock ticker. Thunder (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Lined and grey, smeared with oil, misty with sentiment under its visored cap, the face at the window of the enginecab is Lon Chaney's. Coincidence turns the wheels. The engineer has two sons. One of them is killed. Lon Chaney, driving the train carrying the body to Chicago, gets into a fight with his other son, who happens to be his fireman. While they are milling around the train is wrecked. Later there are backgrounds offering great chances for photography--the engine shops, a Mississippi flood--but they are presented so conveniently that their importance leaks out of the picture. Chaney redeems himself bringing a Red Cross train over tracks covered with water to a flooded town. There is no dialog but plenty of noise--a monotonous scraping sound no more like the big-bellied voice of a real train than the imitation puffing that any trap-drummer can produce with a pair of wire brushes. Chaney acts well; he even walks in the stiff-shoulder fashion of old trainmen. At times he gets into the unreal story the dramatic flavor of its background. Best shot: Chaney feeling the driving-pinions, worn smooth by thousands of miles on the road, of his old engine dismantled in the shops. Charming Sinners (Paramount). Believing, probably correctly, that flattery is a persuasive form of entertainment, producers are presenting with increasing confidence and frequency pictures which assume sophistication in the audience. Only a few of the time-honored tenets of cine-morality are now retained, but these unshakably. In this picture, Clive Brook, as Ruth Chatterton's husband, can be definitely unfaithful to her, but Miss Chatterton after winning him back cannot take her revenge by going to Italy with another fellow as Ethel Barrymore did when she acted in this play (The Constant Wife) on the stage. Miss Chatterton goes away, but she only pretends to have somebody with her. Her tentative paramour gets off the train as it is leaving the station. William Somerset Maugham's epigrams on the sound device, and intelligent acting by a well-chosen cast, suggest what U. S. audiences have learned to accept as the authentic atmosphere of a London drawing-room. Imogene Wilson, now Mary Nolan, plays satirically and deftly as the blonde girl who brings about the inconstancy of the constant wife's husband. Best shot: The ladies mouthing epigrams at tea. Imogene Wilson's long eyelashes, big blue eyes, white skin, ash-blonde hair made her one of the prettiest children in the village orphanage at St. Joseph, Mo., MARY (IMOGENE WILSON) NOLAN . . . all over her. Tinney trouble. where, like the other children, she worked in the laundry, waited on table. When she was 14 her sister, who had married and gone to live in Worcester, Mass., sent her enough money to go east. A brother helped her get from Worcester to New York. An artist named Brown paid her fare on a streetcar one day. She went home with him and he put her face on an advertisement he was making. She posed for Artists Harrison Fisher, Childe Hassam, James Montgomery Flagg, Charles Dana Gibson. She paid for dancing lessons with the money they gave her. Producer Florenz Ziegfeld ousted her from his Follies in 1924 because of unpleasant publicity linking her with Funnyman Frank Tinney who had hit her in the eye. She said she wanted to go some place where men were men instead of black-face comedians. She was in Europe with a musical show when UFA gave her a contract. One of the 14 pictures she made in Germany under the name of Imogene Robertson was about a ward from an orphan asylum who became a famous actress. Returning to the U. S., she dropped her musical comedy name of Imogene Wilson because of the Tinney trouble, and became Cinemactress Mary Nolan. Her first U. S. picture was Sorrell and Son. Universal lately lent her to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to play in West of Zanzibar and Desert Nights.