The New Pictures

Secrets (United Artists). "In every marriage there are secrets--secret joys, secret sorrows--which only one man and one woman know." When Mary Pickford voices this tender aphorism toward the end of her first picture in two years, she is an old lady explaining to her grown-up children why she and her elderly husband (Leslie Howard) wish to go out West and spend their declining years quietly with each other. The secrets of which their children are ignorant are well known to the audience.

The film has shown them from the beginning of their romance in a New England village to the beginning of their senescence. John (Leslie Howard) appears first on a high-wheel bicycle, persuades Mary to go out West with him instead of marrying the British nobleman her family has chosen. In California they live in a cabin, have a child, raise cattle. Rustlers steal the cattle. John organizes a posse, hangs three rustlers. The rustlers burn the cabin, cause the baby to die of shock. John & Mary build a new cabin, have four more children. In course of time. John is nominated for Governor. When he gives a grand reception and one of the guests is a handsome brunette named Senora Martinez (Mona Maris), it comes out amazingly that John has been philandering. Even more amazingly it turns out that Mary has known about it all along. The scandal fails to disturb, for more than a moment, John's happy relations with his wife, fails even to disrupt his campaign for Governor. He has won it, been elected to the U. S. Senate and served in Washington for 30 years by the time his wife explains to their children about the secrets. It cannot be said that Secrets is a powerful picture or a thoughtful one, but it is a graceful romantic narrative in the current full-length fashion, remarkable because Mary Pickford acts so well, still looks so pretty. Some idea of Mary Pickford's career can be suggested by remembering that she had been a cinema star for five years before Adolph Zukor in 1914 acquired her services, which started him on the road to control of the whole cinema industry. Mary Pickford is now 40, and still (like Marion Davies) able to call her own turns, able to get so fine an actor as Leslie Howard opposite her by competence as much as by contract. She has never quite grown accustomed to talkies or to any type of acting for which a close-up view of her smiling profile is not an adequate substitute, but her failure has never embarrassed her. In Secrets she exhibits the same curious knowledge of how to keep the sympathy of an audience which made her a star in two-reel pictures before audiences knew her name. Good shot: Mary, her hair disarrayed by the wind, snuggling up to John for a kiss, in the front seat of a prairie schooner.

Fast Workers (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) bears a superficial resemblance to the tough comedies popularized by Edmund Lowe and Victor McLaglen; it is not really the same sort of picture. Tod Browning is a director who has always been fascinated by the macabre. John Gilbert, completing with this film an expensive contract which he signed before talkies demolished his box-office value, is determined to make his last cinema characterizations as ugly as his early ones were sleek. The story is about a steel worker (Gilbert) who humiliates a mistress (Mae Clark) whom he really loves because he thinks she is unworthy to marry his best friend (Robert Armstrong). It might have made a strong picture if they had not been under the wholly erroneous impression that it needed a thick coating of Oh-Yeah comedy--presumably to emphasize the jollity of such scenes as the one in which Robert Armstrong, acting from confused jealousy when he learns of the girl's relations with Gilbert, tricks Gilbert into falling from a high girder in an unfinished building, then tries to pull him up with the sleeve of a sweater which finally gives way.

The White Sister (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is a talkie production of the picture which with Lillian Gish and Ronald Cowman in the important parts was vastly successful in 1923. Now--partly because Helen Hayes has the Gish role, partly because the action has been localized at the Italian front in the War--it gives the impression of being a minor-league Farewell to Arms. Angela Chiaromonte (Helen Hayes) is the daughter of an elderly Prince (Lewis Stone) who has made arrangements for her to marry a dull young man. Instead of complying, she hobnobs with a young aviator named Giovanni (Clark Gable, with mustache). Going to see Giovanni one evening her car collides with her father's. She is so dejected by his death that she refuses to see Giovanni until, on the day that he goes off to War, she realizes that she still loves him.

All Angela's previous predicaments are larks compared to what happens when Giovanni is at the front. He is brought down in an air fight over enemy terrain. Thinking he is dead, Angela studies to be a nun. Giovanni recovers but gets caught trying to walk back to Italy. By the time he escapes prison camp, Angela has taken her vow of chastity. Giovanni pleads with her to break it. She has no sooner convinced him that this is impossible than a bomb drops on Giovanni. This time he is really done for.

To cinemaddicts unfamiliar with Hollywood fashions, it may seem strange that so sad a picture as The White Sister should have been entrusted for adaptation to Funnyman Donald Ogden Stewart. It is not Stewart's writing which weakens the emotional quality of The White Sister. The picture's mood hovers between the realistic and the romantic; at times, when actionless dialog makes it stand still, it has no mood at all. A performance by Helen Hayes makes almost any picture worth seeing but The White Sister has surprisingly little else to recommend it. Good shot: Angela's duenna (Louise Closser Hale) giving her a brooch when she enters the convent.

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