The New Pictures

Friends were friends in those brave days--

Porthos, Athos, Aramis, I

Graved our hearts with a mystic phrase,

Bound our lives with a mystic tie;

Come, stir your souls with our ringing call

Of "All for one and one for all!"

recites Douglas Fairbanks from the sound-device as prolog to The Iron Mask (United Artists), his sequel to The Three Musketeers. The voice, like all filmed voices, creaks a little, but the spirit which the poetry fails to achieve is incorporated in the superb acrobatics of the only living actor who is also a great athlete. He has his best role again -- D'Artagnan. Cardinal Richelieu, crafty, red-robed, plots endlessly to separate the four swashbucklers who at night sleep side by side in one wide bed and finally die side by side in one battle. Under the window ledge a saddle waits; one leap, and rescue drums toward the girl (Marguerite de la Motte) who, drooping like a flower, dies in his arms. First swordsman of France, D'Artagnan snatches from the dark tower by the river the betrayed king with his sad, muzzled face. Best shot: the four singing swashbucklers returning from the inn.

Photographer Henry Sharp, Director Allan (Robin Hood) Dwan, and Costume Designer Maurice Leloir, who has illustrated the best printed edition of Dumas, supply that scrupulous historical detail which has always made Fairbanks pictures an improvement, for U. S. audiences, on the work of romantic authors. Better also than Dumas, rhythm and comedy are by Fairbanks. He has fought victoriously with life some inner battle which for most people ends in defeat. Middle age has failed to slow up his body. He enables audiences of all ages to study what it is that makes boys the real superiors of grownups.

Douglas Elton Fairbanks was fired from a Denver office where he tilled inkwells because in odd moments he broke furniture, stood on his head. In a stock company and later as a juvenile on Broadway he found that public disorder could be profitable. In 1907 he married one Anna Beth Sully, daughter and heir of a soapmaker who stipulated that Fairbanks must superintend his boiling grease-vats. Six months later Fairbanks returned to the stage, was divorced in 1918, married Mary Pickford in 1920. Once, locked out of his room in the Plaza Hotel, Manhattan, he climbed up the face of the building. In Hollywood he is called "Doug," his wife Miss Pickford. Social leaders, they dance only with each other. She looks after the family accounts. After making his first picture, The Lamb, for the old Triangle company for $2,000 a week, he developed a type of film peculiar to himself, spent $700,000 on The Three Musketeers, almost as much on Robin Hood. Other famous ones: The Nut, The Thief of Bagdad, Don Q, The Black Pirate, The Gaucho.

Ned McCobb's Daughter (Pathe). Sidney Howard wrote the original play which, produced two years ago by the Theatre Guild in Manhattan, was notable for powerful, quick sequences of plot. Translated into pictures, the story of Carrie Callaghan's (Irene Rich's) effort to shield a family name from the combined ravages of a cowardly philanderer (her husband) and a likable criminal (her husband's brother) is just as effective as it was on the stage. That the intention of actors, author, and director is rather to excite the spectators than to say anything much about human life or motives, keeps the piece from being more than a program picture but does not keep it from being an unusually good one. Best shot: Irene Rich offering revenue agents some apples from a pile which, although she does not know it, conceals the body of another, a murdered, revenue agent.

The Ghost Talks (Fox). Funny mystery-pictures are usually pleasanter entertainment than serious ones, and you would think that a newlywed Negro couple in a haunted house could be pretty funny. But, somehow, in this hauntie the fun is not red-hot. The alternate strand of the story concerns Charles Eaton as a boy detective blundering into the capture of some bandits, a familiar rigamarole which never had much drama in it and has long since been worn bare of comedy.

Strange Cargo (Paramount). When the lights went out in the saloon and Richard Barclay, owner of the yacht, made noises indicative of throat trouble, a mystery began which threw suspicion on nearly everyone on board, until Sir Richard's body was found in a suit of armor, and a wriggling Hindu was apprehended as the murderer. People who buy scare-stories in drug stores should like this in spite of the defective sound-synchronization which made the lip-movements of the performers resemble those of dummies in an elaborate ventriloquy act.