The New Pictures

Wild Oranges. This screen version of Joseph Hergesheimer's novel carries out with simple but concrete symbolism the very quality of wild oranges--bitter sweet to the first taste, growing more zestful with each bite, or closeup. Its story is that of a man embittered at fate by the sudden loss of his young bride, who hesitates to take the fruit of Eden offered to him in the person of a lonely girl of the Georgia coast, prisoner alike of fear and a maniacal murderer. The man who fears life's traps finally clutches at the fruit, rescuing the girl while she saves her own soul from the incubus of fear that has ridden her family. The tale is told with extraordinary vividness and pungency by King Vidor, a director who can evoke a heart-quaking spirit of mystery without a single trapdoor. Frank Mayo, Virginia Valli, Ford Sterling, Nigel de Brulier are splendid instruments in one of the exceptional pictures of the year. And a most extraordinary characterization is done by Charles A. Post as a modern Caliban, a hulking beast with a child's mind that wanted to be good.

Icebound. Producer De Mille has dogged the footsteps of Owen Davis's play, except at the single point where he should have stuck closer than a brother. He does not have the wastrel ex-doughboy, returned to his granite New England, set fire to a barn out of heady spite. The cinema producer has the arson committed purely by accident, obviously to keep the censor from snaking a reproving finger. What was good enough to win the Pulitzer prize for 1922 for Playwright Davis is not good enough to get past the screen Cerberus. Thus the ne'er-do-well of the play, discontented with his frigidly austere environment, is apotheosized in the films into a pretty good boy, much put upon for mocking local narrowness. The shiftless youth who was saved by his mother's hand, reaching out from the grave through a devoted girl, becomes merely a sulky Achilles, not far enough gone to the dogs to require a lifeline.

Daughters of Today. Another expose picture, pretending to preach a soapy moral while giving lurid peeps at the flappers and gilded youths of this age in a Hollywood mood. It carries its own criticism, in that the author-producer prefers to remain anonymous.