The New Pictures

Rain or Shine (Columbia). For many years in vaudeville and musical shows Joe Cook has been putting over his personal kind of comedy. In this version of an old Broadway revue, now arranged without music to make the wisecracks come closer together, he gives his corn flakes and feed bill monolog, tells about his farm in Texas, introduces a new act about the escape of a gorilla. He is ably assisted and at times equaled by laconic Tom Howard and insanely grinning David Chasen. But the main amusement is by Cook and enough people like it to permit its classification, now for the first time in the cinema, as a valid individual outcropping of U. S. humor. The story is a wandering anecdote about a pretty girl who owns a tent and is loved by Cook. Denouement: the tent burning down, the heroine hanging by the ankles in midair, Cook rushing in to save her.

When Joe Cook (born Lopez) was 8 he organized a circus parade of his contemporaries and in blue tights, playing a mandolin, led it down Maple Street in Evansville, Ind. riding on his stepfather's horse. Later he became assistant to the Great Doctor Dunbar, medical showman; still later he was a juggler, tumbler, musician, dancer, ventriloquist. After touring the U. S. in vaudeville acts he became a Manhattan headliner in the Vanities. In his house at Lake Hopatcong, N. J., resting on a silver standard, is a baseball which Babe Ruth has not autographed. On his private golf course is a green built in the shape of a cone so that any guest can make a hole in one. He is shy, likes speedboating, collects mementoes, is admired by stagehands.

Common Clay (Fox). When this play won a Harvard prize some years ago (1915) it was considered sensational for its courtroom scene. In a devious manner, with this scene as the climax, the heroine, a night-club hostess who sought reformation as a servant girl only to be betrayed by her boss's son, wins a husband for herself and gets possession of the fatherless baby by proving that she herself is the illegitimate daughter of the attorney defending the rich boy. Somehow a few moments of real dramatic power have been concocted out of this stuff and such moments are well utilized by Constance Bennett, who struggles through the rest of it as well as she can. Typical shot: the servant girl's baby in its mother's arms in court.

Little Accident (Universal). The Elizabethans borrowed from old Latin and Greek plays a comic formula in which an arrangement of young lovers is shuffled, after difficulties, so that each character comes out at the end with a different partner. The formula has been successful in every later generation of the theatre whenever playwrights could think of new devices for causing suspicion, love and mistaken identity. In this instance the device is the birth of a child to the first wife of a young man (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) who is about to be married a second time. It is a homely but fairly funny program picture. Typical shot: a milkwagon horse adding a whinny to a song hiccupped by Fairbanks after a night out.

Grumpy (Paramount). Cyril Maude played Grumpy 1,400 times on the stage. The present talking picture is a competent photograph of any one of the 1,400 performances. It deals with a fatherly criminal lawyer, some young people, and a piece of paste referred to as Biggest Diamond in the World. Sometimes mildly amusing, sometimes definitely saccharine, it is acted by Maude and his supporters with formal theatricality. Worst shots: close-ups of Maude showing his heavy, old-fashioned makeup.

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