The New Pictures

Laughter (Paramount). Donald Ogden Stewart wrote the dialog and he and Director Harry D'Arrast together wrote the story; Nancy Carroll, Frederic March, Frank Morgan act it. Since, like all good dramas, Laughter represents a total of the talents assembled for making it, it is hard to give one more credit than another, but Stewart's personality has most definitely set its stamp on the result. In Laughter for once he has not depended on his particular kind of humor. He has used a theme that has served many generations but which he symbolized in a new and satisfactory way. Laughter has been built creatively, from the inside out, and Director D'Arrast and his associates have made it convincingly a drama of the present time. It concerns a woman who married a rich man much older than herself, and how her marriage affected two younger men who are in love with her. Best shot: Reporters taking Frank Morgan's picture in his costume as Napoleon at a fancy dress ball.

The Life of the Party (Warner). People who feel humiliated when they find themselves laughing at comedy which bases its appeal on noise, cheap wisecracks, furniture smashing, the loss of trousers and similar devices will not enjoy The Life of the Party. It is a slapstick feature with Winnie Lightner and Irene Delroy as a pair of golddiggers who are discharged from a music store, raid a dressmaking establishment, and go to Havana looking for kind old men. It is stupid stuff, yet funny. Best line: a horse-racing Colonel (Charles Butterworth), seeing his entry turn around and run the wrong way when a black cat crosses the track: "Ah, the pity of it."

Renegades (Fox). Another Foreign Legion charade, this one is built around a fascinating spy (Myrna Loy) and four comrades of the Legion, one of whom has been delegated to provide comic relief. Amid camels, shouting, Riffian war, death, seduction, the honor of the Legion is upheld by heroes who bear a startling resemblance to the jobless men who can be found most afternoons in the reading rooms of actors' clubs. Warner Baxter, who has been successful in adventure cinemas because he is what is called a type, continues to be a type. Miss Loy's competence is wasted on the disordered and incredible material. At the end all important members of the cast have been killed. Most inevitable shot: Miss Loy waking the lower nature of Sheik Bela Lugosi.

Morocco (Paramount). This is the most brilliantly acted and directed picture released since Pathe's Holiday. The story is nothing much--the French Foreign Legion as the background for the love affair of a private soldier and a vaudeville star who has seen better days--yet its often mechanical sequences are brought to life by Director Josef von Sternberg. Always aware that a moving picture ought to move, von Sternberg tells the story rapidly and often silently, so that Morocco has the effect of being a silent picture into which dialog has been woven, not the "incidental dialog" of the primitive, remade silent pictures, but incisive, necessary words, labelling and shaping the main currents of the plot. Marlene Dietrich talks with hardly a trace of accent. In her first U. S. picture she lives up to the elaborate publicity issued for her. Her curiously combined resemblances to Greta Garbo and the late Jeanne Eagels do not lessen the impact of her own personality. Gary Cooper's expert underacting as the hero and Adolphe Menjou's return to the U. S. screen are other reasons for Morocco being a good picture. Menjou has a comparatively unimportant role as a disappointed and aging hedonist, a role he has taken before in slightly different forms, but which he has never done better. Best shot: Marlene Dietrich playing to a hostile crowd in a Moroccan cabaret.

Marlene Dietrich, German, had tried to be a violinist, given it up, studied drama at Max Reinhardt's school and played in the German version of Broadway when von Sternberg put her on contract. He said: "Thank God you are not like the American actresses. You can make more than three faces." Mysterious on the screen, she is plump and girlish in private life; she dislikes Hollywood women because "they talk about their bracelets." She knows little English but her accent has been eliminated before the microphone because von Sternberg did not allow her to memorize her lines until she came on the set, then made her repeat them after him until she spoke them perfectly. She has no telephone in her dressing room, is happiest on grey days, has an expensive automobile, admires Joan Crawford, is married, has a baby, is going home for Christmas.

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