The New Pictures

Secrets of Nature (UFA). This is partly a rearrangement of old UFA shots of animals and insects, partly new material. After a routine educational feature about bees you see how ants get the best of a caterpillar, and how a snail beats them; how they get drunk after drinking a secretion of the green wood bugs. Disguised as a twig, the praying mantis stalks its dinner, and the chameleon, wearing stockings, stalks the praying mantis. The film, winds up with the celebrated fight between the mongoose and the cobra which Paramount interpolated as an allegory in The Letter. It lacks unity but even so is a brilliant collection of facts, much easier to remember and much more interesting than the deftest spoken lecture. Best shots: an ant getting down into the ant-heap with a splinter ten times as big as itself; a Pirhana fish, no bigger than your hand, eating 120 Ib. of pork in six minutes.

Her Way to Love (Sovkino). Only the apparent conviction of Russian film directors that no picture is complete unless it points a political moral in support of the existing Russian government-a conviction dictated to them by forces outside their craft-spoils the effect of this good story. Emma Zessarskaya plays a peasant woman who has a love affair with an Austrian prisoner working in Russian fields. As long as the conflict remains a private one between her independent ideas and the standards of her neighbors, the picture is worthwhile, believable. Before it ends the Austrian, a practical, unimaginative fellow up to that time, is inspired to join the Red Army, is killed in what he believes is a war-to-end-war. Best shot: the peasants getting in the wheat.

Night Club. This vapid, badly recorded cabaret revue, introduced without scintillation by Donald Ogden Stewart and composed of flash shots of famous entertainers, of the washroom and a coatrack, has no apparent connection with the story by Katherine Brush from which it is supposed to be taken. To make it long enough for a feature, Director Robert Florey photographed and recorded an audience ceaselessly clapping hands. Worst sound: the henlike cackling of women in the lavabo. The Gamblers (Warner). This picture is a ponderous leer at Wall Street corruption. It has that annoying air of knowingness peculiar to bad parlor realism. In extraordinarily ornate offices, ballrooms, conservatories, H. B. Warner, Lois Wilson and Jason Robards argue and glare and pull each other around. The triangle includes a banker and his son who do not want their accounts investigated, a government investigator, and the investigator's wife who was once--and still is--in love with the banker's son. People who go to the movies every night will have trouble making out who is the hero and who is the villain and this difficulty will not please them. Most expected shot: H. B. Warner deciding to quash the indictment.

Quite accustomed to applying his able talents as an actor to such inane material as this, Henry Byron Warner has made a lot of money in talking pictures because he once went to an English public school. It was not one of the most aristocratic schools, but Henry Byron Warner fitted there all right; his father, Charles Warner, was an actor before him. After finishing with school and with the University College in London, Warner spoke and dressed as though he had been to Eton and Oxford. In the growing success of his early days on the stage, he wore a slight, sharp mustache; his sloping shoulders and handsome, expressive hands gave him distinction. He has been in pictures for 15 years, now plays the district attorney or the husband oftener than the hero, gets fewer letters than younger stars, but has established his reputation as one of the most skillful actors in Hollywood. He is married, six feet tall. Some of his good pictures were The Doctor's Secret, The Divine Lady, Sorrel & Son.

The Sophomore (Pathe). Here is one of those cinema colleges without buildings or curriculum, but this time composed strangely of youths who do not smoke or drink and who expel a fraternity brother as soon as they find a girl in his room. One Eddie Quillan uses trite situations for purposes of comedy. Between arid stretches, two sequences are fairly funny--the college play, when he has to let his worst enemy make love to him, and the football game which he wins by tackling a teammate who is running the wrong way. Sally O'Neil is in the cast. She does fairly well, but the old college material is so stale it is hardly amusing even when parodied. A faintly witty caricature--the radio announcer at the football game. College Coquette (Columbia). Garnished with some guttural and vapid dialog in the mouths of Ruth Taylor and William Collier Jr., the formula of the hero who is expelled after saving his roommate from disgrace is varied by having a girl expelled after trying to save the honor of another co-ed who lost her virtue and walked down an elevator shaft. The survivor, after expulsion, marries the football coach. Typical shots: quartet singing, gin drinking, hockey, football, swapping fraternity pins.