New Pictures

Vitaphone and The Better 'Ole (Syd Chaplin). While Al Jolson mouths "Mammy, Mammy" on the screen, the audience hears Al Jolson throat "Mammy, Mammy" out of what sounds like a loud radio. It is the Vitaphone, now well on its way to fame as purveyor of "canned" music to theatres too small to afford orchestras. After the same slightly harsh, but perfectly synchronized reproduction of Reinald Werrenrath, Elsie Janis, and The Howards, Syd Chaplin proceeds to ramble through a long string of war comics in a film, The Better 'Ole, based on Cartoonist Bruce Bairnsfather's characterization. Old Bill with his familiar pipe and muffler, little Alf, his great worry, and the tyrant corporal, muddle through the war somehow. On the occasion of a camp entertainment, Old Bill and Little Alf are sewed into a stuffed horse to take part in a play entitled Black Beauty or A Horse's Sacrifice. In the middle of the act, a hasty retreat is ordered. No one has time to extricate Bill and Alf from their equine environment. The subsequent adventures of a horse's upper on four human legs, among inebriated German invaders' leads to a timely heroism. Bill becomes a sergeant, pays back all the corporal's petty tyranny. It is doubtful, if even Syd's brother, Charlie, ever made so many people laugh so loud and so long.

It Must Be Love (Colleen Moore). Fernie Schmidt was born in, and for twenty years inhabited, a delicatessen store. But a job at a perfume counter was her ideal. This she gratifies, but when her ambitious lover buys the very store in which Pappa Schmidt made $80,000, as the financial basis for their future marriage, limburger suddenly takes on the fragrance of attar of roses, pickles turn to rosettes, and Fernie, delighted, helps out in the store and back of it. Hoch die Delikatessen!