The New Pictures

Weary River. Richard Barthelmess has just the kind of pleasant tenor voice that you would expect from his face. "Weary River," the theme-song of his first sound-picture, is good enough to be fairly popular. Other films about crooks, however, have had far more interesting heroes than the gangster who develops such musical talent in the prison orchestra that his girl gives him up to let him have his chance in vaudeville. Other talkies have had better dialog than Betty Compson's repetitive "Ah, Jerry," and Barthelmess's "All right, baby." Best shot: close-up of convicts at attention. Like many a handsome, athletic young man who has the air of being an actor in spite of himself, Richard Barthelmess has been in the show business most of his life. His mother, Caroline Harris, played in Biograph pictures at the old Fort Lee (N. J.) studios.

She sent Richard to military school and then to Trinity College at Hartford, Conn. On vacations he played small roles in stock with his mother. Some film people, on location near the Connecticut town where he was working as a clerk, took him to California when they left. His part in D. W. Griffith's Broken Blos soms made him famous.

Marquis Preferred. For a long time Adolphe Menjou's epigrams in pantomime have found expression in scenarios plotted by Ernest Vajda and directed by Frank Tuttle. Deft productions, each containing the same ingredients of wit and social charm, have followed each other like a string of sausages coming out of a hopper. This time a nobleman's servants, knowing that if they let him go bankrupt they will lose the money he owes them, form a corporation to save him from his creditors on condition that he marry an heiress they pick out for him. Once more Menjou, with slight movements of his hands, lips, and eyebrows, convinces you that laughter and humanity can exist under a starched, striped shirt. Wittiest shot of this good picture is the happy ending--Menjou arranging books in the window of a Fifth Avenue bookstore so that their titles explain to his sweetheart that he has gotten a divorce from the heiress.

A Woman of Affairs is Iris March, Michael Aden's "white, so white" lady, now called Diana Merrick to fool Cinema Tsar Will H. Hays, who objected to The Green Hat. As a protector of public morals, Mr. Hays will no doubt shiver when the loose ring, symbol of Miss Merrick's character, slips gently from the tapering hand of Greta Garbo, flung sideways on a sofa which she does not occupy alone. Like Author Arlen and unlike Will H. Hays, Miss Garbo and John Gilbert are among the most conspicuous romanticists of this epoch. Each knows how to invest emotions with the glamor dear to reveries although not found in life. Director Clarence Brown has made the most of tremendous box-office possibilities by sticking closely to the original novel. Best shot: Greta Garbo driving an Hispano-Suiza.