The New Pictures

She-Wolf (Universal). In the last years of the last century, when U. S. millionaires were relatively uncommon, one of the richest, most erratic, most spectacular was Hetty Green. Starting life as Harriet Howland Robinson of New Bedford, Mass., she inherited nine million dollars from her father, a ship-owning Quaker. She astonished her contemporaries first by her penny-pinching, next by her marriage at 33 to "Spendthrift Green" who riotously squandered a million dollars of his own and died in a cheap hotel room paid for by his wife. Hetty Green raised a son and daughter, multiplied her nine million into 67, and in her last days was a strange old body in odd cloaks and shawls who lived in cheap flats with a Skye terrier named Dewey. To her son, Ned, she once gave a package of cancelled insurance policies, told him they were bonds and had him carry them to San Francisco to make sure he was efficient and trustworthy. Assured, she later gave him a railroad in Texas where, more neighborly but no less idiosyncratic than his mother, he owned the first motor car in the State, permitted the use of his railroad for scenes in early cinemas. (Now he lives on Buzzard's Bay, near New Bedford, Mass., in a high stone house enhanced by a private radio station and flying field. At his dock lies a fully geared oldtime whaling ship.) Hetty Green became the heroine of jokes, speeches, anecdotes and finally, after she died in 1916, of a play called Mother's Millions, of which Universal used the plot for She-Wolf.

The film shows a Harriet Breen who trades shrewdly in wheat and railroads, endeavors to outmanipulate a wheat-&-rail speculator who has ruined her husband. Like Hetty Green, she is the Richest Woman in the World, hates lawyers, has a son and daughter whom she treats severely. As Hetty Green might never have done, she stakes her fortune on her son's loyalty to her, gives him a railroad when she wins. To prove she is eccentric, she discharges an old maidservant, pretends to have stolen her savings, then makes her rich.

Like most cinemas dealing with finance, this one reveals no great understanding of Wall Street methods, maintains an unnecessarily pop-eyed attitude toward the interesting but not incomprehensible maneuvers of stockmarket operators. On the other hand, it conveys the clear impression of a character who, if not much like the late Hetty Green, resembles somewhat the world's conception of her. Actress May Robson noticed how Hetty Green's mouth curved down in a hard line under a snub nose, how her eyes sparkled merrily under tufted, threatening eyebrows. An expert in makeup, she made her own features do likewise when she had obtained permission for Author Howard McKent Barnes to write Mother's Millions and make its derivations obvious. Born in Australia 66 years ago, Actress Robson saved her pennies, now has a house on Long Island, another in California, at both of which she indulges her fondness for elaborate aviaries and collecting fountain pens. She-Wolf, is her first cinema; in it her loyal secretary Lillian Harmer plays the part of Hetty Green's servant. Der Grosse Tenor (UFA). Possibly his panoramic countenance and the slow elaboration of detail to which Cinemactor Emil Jannings is addicted have helped to convince critics that his characterizations are more searching than they really are. Nonetheless, he often contrives to take a banal situation--in this case that of an opera singer who loses his voice--and make apparent the underlying values which have caused it to become banal. The great tenor is a debauched and frivolous celebrity who calls his fox-terrier Lohengrin, enjoys entertaining ladies in his dressing room, and goes to South America without his wife. There he discovers, in a moment which might have been one of beery pathos, that he can no longer sing. When he gets back to Germany, fresh air and exercise help restore his voice. Played in German, with a good anonymous tenor voice in the intervals when Emil Jannings makes gestures appropriate to singing, Der Grosse Tenor was exhibited in Manhattan last week at the UFA Cosmopolitan Theatre, hereafter to be used for other untranslated UFA products.* The Maltese Falcon (Warner). Author Dashiell Hammett, a onetime Pinkerton detective, improved the technique of horrifying readers by writing quick, unmannered prose and by making his characters tough as well as unscrupulous, appallingly bad as well as secretive. Some of the characters in the best-selling Maltese Falcon were too bad to be included in a cinema. Others--an adolescent boy addicted to a gruesome technique in murder, an elderly gentleman with nice manners and a furtive attitude toward homicide (Dudley Digges), and a shrewd, lighthearted, brutal detective (Ricardo Cortez) --are bad enough. All of them are eager to acquire an item of antique jewelry/--- the Maltese falcon. They commit a total of three murders in the effort to do so. In a wry conclusion, the Maltese falcon is found to be valueless; the detective delivers the heroine (Bebe Daniels) to the police for hanging. The Lawyer's Secret (Paramount). However distressing it may be when a client comes to his lawyer and confesses to being implicated in a murder, the lawyer's situation becomes even more painful when he is asked to defend another person (Richard Arlen) unjustly accused of the same crime. To accept this case would be to endanger his first client and therefore unethical, even though the lawyer's fiancee begs him to do it. His fiancee does not know that by responding to her entreaties the lawyer would imperil her brother, who is the guilty client. This highly improbable quandary was deemed suitable for the transformation of Charles ("Buddy") Rogers from a wildly popular juvenile of early talkies into a somewhat hollow-eyed young character actor who does not find forbiddingly incongruous a role in which he is definitely connected with a crime and finally given a jail sentence.

* Another German company, Tobis, last week announced the organization of two subsidiary companies to establish foreign film theatres in the U. S.--subject to the licensing conditions denned at the Paris conference of German and U. S. producers last year.

/- The Mediterranean island of Malta, first colonized by Phoenicians, was given by Emperor Charles V to the Knights of the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem on condition that the Knights of St. John would acknowledge Spanish suzerainty by sending him, annually, a falcon. The Knights of St. John, afterward called the Sovereign Order of the Knights of Malta, repulsed 38,500 invading Mohammedans at the siege of Malta in 1565. Later they admitted members of the European nobility into their order. Last week the Knights of Malta, still flourishing, gathered in Rome to elect a Grand Master, after forswearing "hate, fear, love and hope of gain." This Grand Master, 76th since the order was founded in the nth Century, will enjoy the status of a Prince and, as head of a sovereign order be entitled to send diplomatic representatives to foreign courts. The new Grand Master elected: Prince Ludovico Chigi-Albani della Rovere.

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