The New Pictures

Ten Nights in a Bar-Room (Roadshow Productions). In cities where drinking is the principal source of humor for a large social class this tract has been successful when presented as burlesque. There is nothing burlesqued in the picture and the serious mood makes it funnier than any burlesque could be. It is funny in an amiable, homely way, as if long before the sound-device or Prohibition had ever been heard of a company had somehow made Ten Nights in a Bar-Room with sound and revived it now as a gentle souvenir of the cinema technique as well as the moral problems of old times. Even routine lines seem packed with delicious possibilities.

The Handsome Traveller: "Can you give me a room and bath?"

The Hotel Keeper's Blonde Daughter: "I can give you a room, but the bath is at the end of the hall."

There is also the roaring command "Everybody to the bar! The drinks are on the house!" Immensely funny are the exaggerated writhings of William Farnum's conscience as the battle for his soul goes on between Little Mary and the Demon Rum. Funny is the frail barroom, which trembles as if it were about to go to pieces at the first premonition of the great fight scene. That these excellences are unintentional in no way detracts from the power of Ten Nights in a Bar-Room. Yet there is pathos in it too, for William Farnum and Thomas Santschi used to put on fistfights in silent pictures that are still famed for their realism. Now both are aging, paunchy men, and their struggle is grotesque, humiliating, feeble. In the end Farnum quits drinking and Little Mary does not die in spite of being hit in the head by a beer schooner when she goes to bring her father home from the saloon.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed

(University Film Foundation). Making a film puppet-show is even more complicated than making an animated cartoon. This one, though lighted so as to give the effect of a silhouet, is three dimensional. The figures had to be drawn, then cut out of cardboard and sheet-lead, then articulated so that they could move. A German designer, Mrs. Lotte Reiniger, working with Walter Ruttmann (who made for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari expressionistic sets never surpassed in the cinema) spent three years on The Adventures of Prince Achmed. The story is tenuous. Achmed makes love, goes to war, combats a sorcerer in settings and among characters taken from the Arabian Nights. Aladdin is there, though now he has to light his lamp instead of rubbing it to summon genii. There are the Sultan, the Magic Horse, the fairy Peri-Banov, the Princess Dinarzade. Like contortionism and sword-swallowing, the picture is remarkable principally because its technique was difficult, but it is a nice fairy story. Good shots among the 300,000 scenes that had to be built with Chinese perseverance and separately photographed to make this feature that runs an hour: storm-tossed waves with gleaming white crests made by cut paper and double-exposure; Achmed riding his horse across a desert while the sorcerer sends lightning to frighten him.

The Easiest Way (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Cinema seers who get this at their theatres the same week as Honor Among Lovers will note interesting points of comparison. For while The Easiest Way is really a very old play indeed (Frances Starr acted it in 1909) it is so forthright and so well equipped with up-to-the-minute dialog that it is not dated in any way. Unlike the girl in Honor Among Lovers, Constance Bennett accepts the jewels, apartment, automobiles which her employer offers her. The result is a drama which proceeds directly out of the pressure of circumstance on character. There are few cliches in The Easiest Way and the people in it behave naturally, free from the gloomy necessity of making credible a prearranged climax. The girl takes what she can get when she needs it --first, luxury, because she is poor and her family is always plaguing her for money; then she falls in love with the blatantly juvenile Robert Montgomery and turns down Mr. Menjou's patronage, only to go back to him when she is needy again. The Easiest Way is not important entertainment but with the eldest and most alluring of the Bennett girls in the middle of its plot, it is better than the average. Good shots: the blindfold cigaret tableau posed in a commercial art studio; a poor family, dressed up in their best clothes, coming down a dingy flight of stairs alongside a barber shop to go to a funeral; the strategy of a red-headed hotel clerk who lets his penurious roomer have her key. withheld because of an unpaid bill, when he sees her in the lobby with a man in evening clothes.

Honor Among Lovers (Paramount). Although the metropolitan people in this picture live in the most impressively modern apartments recently seen in the cinema; although they play backgammon instead of bridge and use, in. telephoning, the five-number dial system which has been in Manhattan only since Dec. 16, 1930, there is nothing modern about Honor Among Lovers except what was modern about Tosca or the Belasco stage of 20 years ago.' It is the story in which the wife of an embezzler goes to a wealthy friend and offers herself to him in return for money enough to keep her husband out of jail. Honor Among Lovers (a title which has nothing to do with the story) is so nicely directed by Dorothy Arzner and so brilliantly acted by Claudette Colbert and Fredric March that it is exciting in spite of its improbability. There are times when the even, natural dialog is reminiscent of the now famous Laughter. The triangle consists of March as a rich Wall Street trader, Miss Colbert as his secretary, Monroe Owsley as the man she marries to avoid the daily improper proposal from her boss. Good scene: Owsley as the ruined, hysterical peculator, waking out of an alcoholic doze to tell his wife what has happened.

Father's Son (First National). This is an unpretentious, appealing little picture based on a story by Booth Tarkington and vitalized by Tarkington's flair for writing about adolescents. It tells about a boy who lives in just such a frame house as millions of U. S. boys live in and who diverts himself like these other millions but who has a hard time because his pranks get on the nerves of his pompous father (Lewis Stone). The combat between father and son reaches a climax when the mother leaves home and sets up a separate establishment with her son. Then the family is reunited by the arbitration of a friendly doctor. There are sentimental stretches in Father's Son, but it is effective most of the time, paced exactly right by Director William Beaudine. Young Leon Janney gives a fine performance as the boy. Typical shot: Janney riding past his father's office in the junk-wagon of his crony, a Negro named Vestibule.

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