The New Pictures

The Cavalier has Richard Talmadge, long popular in horse-and-pistol pictures, playing two parts--El Caballero, rescuer of the daughter of an impoverished grandee, and Taki, a good Indian helping the other poor Indians, ground down by Spain in South America. He flings that dagger through the window, is chased by those bloodhounds, jumps over that wall, snatches that bride at the altar onto his horse and, as they approach the leap over the ravine, says, "It may mean--Death. . . ." at which she answers, "Death . . . with you. . . ." Spectators lingered in the hope that at some point in this nonsensical fairbanking Mr. Talmadge would fight a duel to death with his double and that they would both win.

The Midnight Taxi shows Helene Costello falling for an honest bootlegger in a complicated but exciting melodrama filmed on a train. A variation between the race between the car and the train is one between train and airplane. In sound, Comedian Tommy Dugan is the screen's first stammerer. Best shot: the line of taxicabs bringing Antonio Moreno's Scotch up from the boat. Best loud-line (Dugan) : "I was in jail but I got pppp ... I got pppp . . . par . . . they let me out for a while. . . ." Best criticism (Variety) "Can go into any wired house for a week."

The Legend of Gosta Berling, made in Sweden several years ago, brought the disturbing face of Greta Garbo to the notice of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Co. Lars Hanson (here Gosta Berling, an unfrocked Swedish preacher in love with a Count's wife in a Nobel Prize story by Selma Lagerloef) came to Hollywood with her but quarreled with directors, protested against the stupidity of the roles they gave him, went back to Stockholm where he is now a leading "legit" actor. Miss Garbo, too, after immediate success, showed temperament but was soothed. In this picture, awkwardly constructed, ludicrously titled, finely acted, richly set, her languor is slightly more girlish and less exciting than that which, in recent films, has ravished U. S. manhood.

Ten Days That Shook the World, heralded as another masterpiece from Amkino (Russian) studios, producers of Potemkin, turned out to be a brilliant, tiresome piece of Soviet propaganda. In an impressionistic manner not, as is commonly believed, originated by him, Director Eisenstein shows kaleidoscopic guns firing, statues falling, bottles breaking in superimposed shots the rapidity of which strains the eyes and makes them hard to watch. Hollywood directors, advised by intellectuals to learn their Eisenstein, would profit little from seeing, as they will not, this newsreel of the Russian revolution which lacks the most valuable feature that a newsreel can have--impartiality.

The Wind blows without stopping all year long across the bleak pocket of the prairie to which Lillian Gish comes in her first picture in a year and a half. Her cousin's wife, a prairie woman whose hands are almost always bloody from cutting up steers, is jealous of the influence of the visiting Gish girl over her home, her husband, her tough, irritable children. When the girl is forced to marry a cattle-rustler to get away from her cousin's house, a drama, familiar in its conflicts but brooding, powerful, works up in the clapboard house battered by sand and by the wind which, according to Indian legend, is a ghost horse gone crazy in the sky. Not a work of genius but far better than the average movie story, this picture gives Miss Gish the best and in fact the only opportunity she has had since Way Down East for exercising the talent which has made her famous.

Lillian Gish and David Wark Griffith met in Mary Pickford's dressing-room in the old Biograph studio. Lillian Gish had left Massillon, Ohio, to go on the stage with her sister Dorothy. As a fairy in The Good Little Devil she was lifted across the stage by a wire which broke one night and dropped her on the floor. She burst into tears, later rewarded with a salary which gave each trembling drop the literal value of a pearl.

Griffith made her an old woman--the pinchfaced mother in Judith of Bethulia, Intolerance; he made her an outcast girl in Way Down East, Colonel Cameron's sweetheart in Birth of a Nation. She went with him from Biograph to Reliance, Majestic, Fine Arts, Artcraft, First National, United Artists. Somehow, no matter how bad the scenario was, her intelligence brought to certain moments and situations that reality which is the definition of great acting and which Miss Gish's famous frailty, her dimples, her soft, elliptical face, and her pale hair down to her waist could not keep people from recognizing. Now under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, she is directed by Victor Seastrom.

Dorothy Gish, the third name inscribed with that of Lillian, of Griffith, in the heart of the U. S. public was not the little girl who jumped over a cliff in Birth of a Nation. Many cinema fans, their memories bemused by thousands of flickering faces, have lost dollar bets on that fact. The girl who jumped over the cliff was Mae Marsh. Other bets have concerned the sisters' ages. Lillian is 32. Dorothy is 30. Just as pretty as Lillian (5 ft. 4 in. tall, red-blonde hair), cleverer perhaps, certainly shrewder, Dorothy wanted romance to be concrete, loved while Lillian acted, married (James Rennie, dark-haired "legit" actor) while Lillian stayed single. In the many pictures in which the sisters have appeared together, Dorothy's acting, always accurate, lacked the indefinable distinction of Lillian's. Since leaving pictures in 1922 she has wanted to return to a medium where she could have the advantage of voice. Last week (see below) she appeared in Manhattan in "legit" drama.