The New Pictures

Ladies Must Dress. After repulsing the improper advances of her employer's son, a shopgirl (Virginia Valli) marries the honest poor boy whom she has captivated with her girl friend's sartorial assistance. This merry plot is a frayed and apparently accidental ribbon tied to the wrist of a fashion show.

The Devil Dancer, in the remote stamping ground of the lamas,* is not a native Mongolian but the child of an unfortunate white woman. She, Takla, on reaching maturity, is discovered by an English explorer who takes her rapidly away to India. Here Takla is not a success. Her social value becomes so low that the sister of the explorer, hearing that he intends to marry his discovery, has her kidnapped by an immoral blackman. Only the extraordinary resourcefulness of the scenario writer makes it possible for Takla to evade both the unpleasant death being prepared for her in the lama monastery and the imminent misconduct of her kidnapper. A glad conclusion becomes, thus, inevitable and the picture stops. Famed Gilda Gray, whose name has always been a synonym for that improper motion of the body, the shimmy, is to be seen whirling about in the innocuous curves of the devil dance. While she is not dancing, she makes no effort to wriggle out of her responsibilities. Whenever, in the course of the plot, she is called upon for a momentary snatch of acting, she is competent. Her well-shaped shoulders support a weak story and expensively featureless directing. The dusty hills and mountains of darkest Tibet are spectacular but they are not, one suspects, very far far from Southern California. Actress Gilda Gray was born in Poland to a poor man named Michelsky. He named his daughter Mariana, emigrated to New Jersey, worked hard in a packing plant. Mariana grew up to marry a bartender who was also a bad character; when she left him, she got a job at $8 a week singing in sawdust floored saloons. From that point her story is merely the brief, trite, magnificent U. S. epic of success. Someone who watched her dancing detected a charm that had nothing in common with Pavlova's grace, or with the sweeping symmetry of Isadora Duncan, or with the stereotyped but enticing flections practised now on musical comedy stages by the Duncan Sisters. When Mariana Michelsky sang her songs in the honkytonks, the cheap sports stopped talking and stared at her with the impudence fading out of their faces. A few years later, called Gilda Gray by that time, she went into the Ziegfeld Follies in Manhattan. Since then she has toured the U. S., acted in cinemas, allowed her husband, Gil Boag (against whom she has recently filed charges in a suit for divorce), to advertise her as well as any woman has ever been advertised.

The Lone Eagle. The transoceanic flights of last summer have been covered by a multitude of cinemas. The Lone Eagle is one of the more petty. It describes the aeronautical antics of an aviator in the late war who. disproves a rumor of cowardice by winning a desperate air duel and a French girl. Film directors are fast learning how to make fainthearted habitues of the cinema grow dizzy at the sensation of being high up in the air. In this, The Lone Eagle is successful. The Lovelorn. On the staff of al most all important U. S. news-sheets there is a lady, sometimes impersonated by a blue-jowled police court reporter, whose duty it is to supply a column of friendly counsel to cor respondents who sign themselves "Blue-eyes" or "Blonde" or "Brokenhearted." The most famed proprietor of such a column is one Beatrice Fair fax, who at her littered desk, sur rounded by helpmates, appears by proxy in this film. The plot, supposed ly non-fictitious, details the amorous bewilderments of those whose wails and whines serve Miss Fairfax as a means of support. There is the gay young girl who scorns the boy her older sister loves, preferring to play around with streetsheiks. There are the boy friends, some good, some less good, who make their proper and im proper proposals. Finally the older sister, following the advice supplied by Miss Fairfax, gets her man. Chicago. Roxie Hart is the prototype of those curious but familiar public idols, the little blonde murderesses. After she has killed her man, Roxie is frightened for a few minutes. But what with the excitement of telling the reporters how she came to do it, the delights of seeing her name right up in big black letters on yellow or pink paper, the merry diversion of raising her skirt and eyebrows at the jury so that they will acquit her, she quite naturally forgets that she has committed a crime.

Satire is a mood that has long been popular on the stage, where Roxie first displayed her not entirely innocent enticements to a jury of twelve true men. On the screen, satire has been somewhat neglected. But on the whole and in good measure due to the raucous energies of Phyllis Haver in the leading role, Chicago is a suprisingly vigorous and sardonic sneer at some of the more preposterous contemporary idiocies.

The Girl from Chicago. Little Mary Carlton, when she comes to Manhattan from her ancestral mansion in the South, tells the gang of crooks who have packed her brother off to prison for a murder he did not commit, that she comes from Chicago. In view of this admission, even her inability to smoke cigarets as if she had done it before does not convince the bad men that she is not a racketeer. Eventually, with the aid of the police and some airplanes, she saves her brother and wins the love of the detective who has been masquerading as a gangster. Despite waste motion and a high degree of improbability, those who like to shiver at make-believe gunmen will be able to do so. Conrad Nagel, playing the hero, wears without embarrassment the name of "Handsome Joe."

*Members of a Buddhist sect, flourishing in Tibet or Mongolia; not to be confused with llamas, wooly, malodorous, South American, sheeplike ruminants.