The New Pictures

Shadows of Fear is a testimonial to a short, awkward, massive, bearded, sharp-nosed shadow, that of Emile Zola from whose novel, Therese Raquin, the story is accurately taken. How a girl connives with her lover to push her invalid husband into the Seine and how her subsequent life advances with recriminations, nightmares, protests, to a suicide in the dead man's room in the firelight is told on the screen with the beautiful realism that was the movement of Zola's mind. Splendidly acted by a Franco-German company hitherto unknown to the U. S., directed by Jacques (Faces of Children) Feyder, this is the first picture in which the resources of continental literature are realized in a photography comparable to Hollywood's.

Show People,* famed ones, William S. Hart, Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Norma Talmadge, John Gilbert, Mae Murray, Rod La Rocque, Leatrice Joy, Aileen Pringle, Estelle Taylor, Claire Windsor were paid $7.50 (regular pay per day for extras) and given a good lunch by Marion Davies for showing their faces on her location. Only she and William Haines were in working clothes that day. taking the last scenes of a comedy about a girl who lets the movies swell her head. Hollywood directors distrust pictures that turn the camera on itself, believing illusion is an asset always more valuable than intimacy. Their belief is supported by Show People which, in spite of Marion Davies' acting. King Vidor's directing, and the hilarious rehearsal of a pie-comedy, reminds you that Harry Leon Wilson's Merton of the Movies, written seven years ago, was both funnier and more human than anything dealing with the same subject has been since.

More interesting than her picture, Marion Davies is still the smartest of the four daughters of Bernard Douras, Brooklyn (N. Y.) judge. She was educated in a Sacred Heart Convent and the Ziegfeld Follies, drawn for magazine covers, and snapped one day on the beach by a newsreel photographer. Louis J. Selznick, then Napoleon of producers, starred her; later she met William Randolph Hearst and joined his company, the Cosmopolitan. Now with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, she plays golf, stutters when excited, drives a Packard roadster, has a bulldog named inevitably, Buddy. On the lot a butler and cook give her lunch in a $35,000 stucco bungalow; she gets dressed in a room on wheels. She is not married but plots to get other people married. When Lindbergh visited Los Angeles, she was the only cinema star who entertained him. At parties she gives imitations of Lillian Gish (in suspense), Jetta Goudal (with horsehair), the Prince of Wales (fatigued), Mae Murray (lip) and herself. Two years ago, becoming 30, she turned comedian.

Dry Martini. People who have never poisoned their bodies with alcohol will find in this film, written by John Thomas, a highly immoral presentation of what happens when a young U. S. femme goes to the Ritz Bar. The furnishings of that bar, human and material, and the somewhat flippant spirit of a father who has been abroad so long he does not recognize his daughter, permit a situation in which probably for the first time in cinema history a good young man is smacked when he tries to correct the morals of a bad young man.

The Cop (William Boyd) wins the gang-leader's girl (Jacqueline Logan), this time in a disconnected picture released perhaps too late, perhaps still soon enough to share the harvest reaped for producers by every bomb, dick, and scarey.

* Not to be confused with Show Girl, an unsuccessful adaptation of J. P. McEvoy's novel of that name.