The New Pictures

The Enemy Sex. This renovated version of Owen Johnson's novel, The Salamander, shows how times have changed, for the book in its time was a sensation, dealing as it did with girls who dared everything in order to accumulate a little experience. Now it seems like just a modest little evening at home, compared to all the Flaming Youth's that have lately tried to set the screen on fire. In order to put novelty into it, the heroine is made to say, with the pertinacity of a parrot, "I'm a good girl; I expect a man to make one mistake--but only one." Betty Compson, looking her prettiest, is probably so well-behaved because the picture was directed by her future husband, James Cruze. The story of this girl, angling for a husband among various flirtatious businessmen, gathers headway slowly, as respectably riotous films often do. But it is true to life in that the girl, faced with marrying the man who has wealth and position to give her (Huntly Gordon), or the man who has nothing but his drunken habits (Percy Marmont), chooses the latter.

The Code of the Wilderness. The old West may be changing, but it continues to find locations in which to grind out the ever-trustworthy story of the girl from the East, with her conventional prejudices, brought into collision with the handsome man of the great open shirtfronts who knows only the law of the gun. It is easy to foresee that the girl, with her strait-laced notions about the dastardliness of shooting even in self-defense, is herself going to be faced with the problem of killing a man, before her brain clears. Then Alice Calhoun feels free to love John Bowers, though he claims three murders to his credit. The photoplay is not bad for its type, though an outstanding feature is the utter absence of juries after each homicide.

Recoil. Psychology, which now and again finds a place on the screen, gets in some of its best work here. In this film transcription of Rex Beach's story, an American girl, forced by privation to become an adventuress, marries a wealthy man for his money, deserts him and seeks love with a crook. The avenging husband forces them to live together, threatening to expose the woman for bigamy, and then, as propinquity causes them to hate each other, the fight begins. Betty Blythe (in a blonde wig), Mahlon Hamilton and Clive Brook show some very human reactions.

Those Who Dance deals with the horrendous results of drinking illicit hooch made in the U. S. under the filthiest of conditions and tagged with some of the most expensive-looking foreign labels. But it is not a temperance lecture--its moral is put over too painlessly for that. Behind it is an occasionally effective melodramatic structure wherein a man of society, joining the Federal Prohibition forces because of the death of his sister, dons a disguise that would actually mislead the sharp-witted breed, the bootlegger, and succeeds in laying low Demon Rum. Blanche Sweet, Bessie Love and Warner Baxter stand out in this film.