The New Pictures

The Strange Case of District Attorney M (German). While this was being made in Germany, a much more effective picture with exactly the same plot--Her Private Affair--was released in the U. S. In the imported version, Marie Jacobeni plays the part of the state prosecutor's wife who has murdered her blackmailing onetime lover. Miss Jacobeni, who looks a lot like Bebe Daniels, is fairly competent, but not enough of a genius to make credible or even intelligible the artificial story, jerkily presented and badly photographed. Typical shot: the murderess coming back to her box at the opera with the love-letters in her corsage.

Sarah and Son (Paramount). This will appeal principally to women. Its theme--mother love--is stated from a woman's point of view. Avoiding the familiar cinematic formula, in which the relationships of children to their mothers are sentimentalized in the recollections of older people, it shows a woman whose life is entirely changed because, when she was young and poor, her husband took her baby away from her by stealth and gave it to some rich people who wanted to adopt a child. Much of the picture concerns her efforts to get her son back again, and in these sequences the effects of frustration on her character are beautifully worked out.

There are times when the efforts of Director Dorothy Arzner to vitalize every possible emotional value of her material become too apparent, as in the mother's hysteria when she first finds out the child is gone, and in the final scene, when the baby, now adolescent, is called upon to choose, in delirium, between his real mother and his foster-mother. These faults are not important. Sarah and Son is a vigorous and moving story, properly told. It covers a long period, and the arrangement of time, perhaps the most difficult problem in building a cinema, is worked out naturally in the physical and mental changes of the central character, Ruth Chatterton. She uses, for instance, a German accent, very marked in the beginning, then less strong, finally no more than the faint shadow of a guttural. Her mood, tuned with her circumstances and what she knows about life, alters from fierce, bewildered anguish, to a cold, shrewd determination to get even with the world, and then to a tolerant, warmly human sophistication. Best shot: Miss Chatterton meeting the deaf and dumb boy who is being palmed off on her as her own son.

While she was in Miss Hazen's School at Pelham Manor, N. Y., Ruth Chatterton went to Washington for the Christmas holidays with four other girls and a chaperone. Because she had been talking all term about wanting to be an actress, one of her friends dared her to try to get a job at a theatre near the hotel. She took the dare. A year later, when she was 15, she got out of the musical show and into a small part in a stock company with Lowell Sherman, Pauline Lord. Lenore

Ulric. When she was 18 she was starred. She went abroad for her vacations, learned French, translated La Tendresse, played the leading part herself. When she was in

The Devil's Plum Tree in Los Angeles, Emil Jannings asked her to make a picture with him. She is married to Ralph Forbes, an English actor. She is 5 ft. 2 in. tall, was born on Christmas Eve, 1893.

Lummox (United Artists). Winifred Westover spent six weeks eating fattening foods so as to be big enough for the title role in this biography of a cook and scrubwoman with a big heart. She remains a tall, blonde young woman, muscular but fairly slender, still lacking the heroic proportions Novelist Fannie Hurst was thinking about, just as Miss Hurst's novel lacked the deep artistry it needed to portray adequately the character she conceived. The cinema is a light drama of incident, mawkish at times, overconscious at other times. Best shot: an usher handing the Lummox a program when she goes to hear her son's piano concert.

Smellies

U. S. Patent No. 1,749,187 was issued last week in Washington to one John H. Leavell of Los Angeles on a device to provide cinematic smells appropriate to images thrown on the screen and noises issuing therefrom.

Explained the Patent Office:

"Method of and apparatus for presenting theatrical impression. An apparatus for supplying an olfactory impression in conjunction with a motion picture impression which comprises means for transmitting said motion impression to an audience, means for producing an odor normally associated with said motion picture impression, and means operated by said first means for expelling said odor into the atmosphere breathed by the audience.''

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