The New Pictures

(See front cover)

The Awful Truth (Pathe). The efforts of young couples recently married to make adjustments requisite to their new mode of living have furnished material for numerous theatrical pieces, few of them more lighthearted than this play of Arthur Richman's. It was a play well fitted to be made into a picture because it moves fast, avoids dexterously all the deeper implications of its situations. Even the judge and family friend who early in the proceedings grants the Warriners an interlocutory decree of divorce is clearly in collusion with the author in his determination to bring things out happily. After the hearing he leaves the two who are no longer husband and wife alone in his chambers. Coming in, after a decent interval, he is so hopeful of a reconciliation that he is bold to ask Ina Claire whether "anything had happened," and Miss Claire, who has spent her respite quarreling with Henry Daniel about opening a window, answers laconically, "Nothing unusual." You might lift her phrase from its context and apply it as criticism to the picture as a whole but only, in fairness, if you excluded the suavity of the tone with which it is uttered and the unfailing gaiety that gives it point. Director Marshall Neilan does a good job transposing stage values to the screen. Actress Claire plays with a deftness perfected during the weeks when she was doing The Awful Truth on Broadway. Denouement: the husband learns the awful truth of the intrigue of which he has suspected his wife, and which, of course, was not an intrigue at all. Best shot: showing the use that can be made of a pass key.

In a year filled with the marriages of prodigies-George Herman ("Babe") Ruth to a showgirl; Charles Augustus Lindbergh to the shy, poetic daughter of an Ambassador; James Joseph Tunney to an outdoorish girl descended from one of the great steel families-not the least startling was the marriage of John Gilbert, ballyhooed by millions of shopgirls as the greatest living exponent of male sex appeal, to Ina Claire (TIME, May 20). It was particularly startling because up to the moment when their marriage was announced Gilbert was supposed to be betrothed to Greta Garbo, the greatest living exponent of female sex appeal, and Miss Claire to Scenario Writer Gene Markey. She had known Gilbert for only a fortnight. They were married in Las Vegas, Nev., before a little group of cowboys, storekeepers and cinema friends. Those members of the cinema public not familiar with Miss Claire's stage reputation were informed in a flood of publicity material what sort of a Thisbe this was who had charmed their Pyramis. The secret of her success seemed compressed into the following grave statement by Miss Claire (in an "interview" where she was discussing Mistresses Nell Gwyn, Cleopatra, Lady Hamilton et al):

"A glance into the pages of history certainly should convince one that the famous beauties of the World were never lacking in native intelligence and shrewdness. . . . To emulate the achievements of any of the noted beauties of the world requires a pretty highly-geared mental equipment."

Chronicles of more regent date make it clear, that Miss. Claire's personal glances into the pages of history were first made in Washington, D. C., where she grew up and went to public school. Her father was killed in an accident four months before she was born. Although her present familiarity with the great figures of the past suggests, perhaps correctly, long silent hours devoted to scholarship, friends recall that her penchant for playing hooky worried her mother a lot until Ina convinced her that, as she had already determined to become an actress, she did not need an education. What she needed, she insisted, was emotion. She made what use she could of this quality in her first vaudeville part, which she achieved in 1907, and which consisted mostly of imitations of Harry Lauder. After warming up on Orpheum and Proctor circuits she played in the cast of The Girl from Utah in England, then in another play or two, then back to vaudeville, then in the Follies of 1915 and 1916. Ziegfeld, who liked her imitations, let her do one of Marie Odile, star of a Belasco play then current. David Belasco saw her and gave her the leading role next season in Polly with a Past.

It has been often pointed out that Ina Claire is one of the few Follies girls to make and keep, a reputation in the serious theatre. Unlike the numerous slightly or violently dowdy ladies whose one claim to distinction after youth has. passed is that they, were once members of a Follies chorus', she found musical comedy more than a means for leaving the stage. Schooled by Belasco-who has so often seen talent where other producers saw nothing at all-she had a series of successes in comedy dramas of a sophistication suited to her flexible, quick voice and the knowing angle of her head in its paintbrush swirl of blonde hair (The Gold Diggers, Grounds for Divorce, Bluebeard's Eighth Wife, The Last of Mrs. Cheyney). She has managed to withstand the floodlight of attention which the press of three continents turned loose on her honeymoon abroad, still in progress. There was one crucial night at Cap D'Antibes when she and Gilbert argued about what to do after dinner-he for staying in, she for going outa night spent so distinctly to her own taste that at 5:30 a. m. Gilbert, still sitting up and still alone, got into his car and drove off at a furious pace into the Riviera dawn. Mrs. Gilbert came home, became excited, threw some things in a suitcase, went away somewhere. Reunited in Paris, they now refer to this incident as a "slight tiff." They are returning to the U. S. soon to make more pictures.

Speedway (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Automobile racing at Indianapolis is a background unfamiliar and colorful enough to make any sort of picture entertaining in spots. In this film about a whimsical mechanic's love life, the background is sketchily and conventionally treated. William Haines capitalizes his famed insouciance to the point of insufferability. Proving at the denouement that he is a good chap after all, he sacrifices the race to his pal, Ernest Torrence, best ac tor in the cast. Best shot: a car turning over on the track.

Because he is four inches taller than a six-foot hero, and because his eyebrows are thick and his face rugged, Ernest Torrence has lost countless hand-to-hand cinema fights, has been unlucky before the camera at cards, and has held countless beautiful women in his arms -as their father. He is Scotch. He went on the stage in London in 1901 as baritone with the Savoy Opera Company. For ten years thereafter this huge savage-looking man toured the U. S. in musical comedy. His first picture was Tolable David.

Why Leave Home (Fox). First a stage comedy and then a film, The Cradle Snatchers in its third adaptation is a noisy, dull relic, not improved by spasmodic songs. Three wives take revenge on their perfidious husbands by hiring three college boys to dance with them, but at the inn where they go to meet their husbands they find them with the three boys' three sweethearts. Best and most painful shot: the three sad young men teaching the three sad old women to dance.