The New Pictures

Innocents of Paris (Paramount). Maurice Chevalier is a French cabaret singer known in the U. S. only to the few who have heard him in Paris, or on nights when he did not have a cold during his short engagement this spring in Florenz Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolic (TIME, March 4). He had been built into a cinema celebrity with the most expensive and intense advertising campaign ever invested in a foreign actor. In this talkie he pulls a little boy out of a French suicide-river so that he can sing to him. He is poor, penniless, a junkman, but he tells the little boy he is an antiquarian. That makes the audience cry. The little boy's mother is dead -she committed suicide--so Chevalier takes him to the junkshop. Later the junkman becomes the star of one of those French musical comedies where the girls roll their eyes like Irene Bordoni. Some of the songs are in English, but the better ones are French--"Les Ananas" and "Valentine." Best shot: young David Durand beginning to cheer up when Chevalier puts on a three-cornered cap and plays the drum for him.

Before he was 12, Chevalier painted dolls in a factory at Menilmontant, near Paris. He tried to be an acrobat but sprained his ankle. Later he made three francs an evening imitating famed singers in the Casino des Tourelles. He danced with Mistinguette at the Folies-Bergere, went to war, escaped from a German prison camp to get back to the Folies. Ernst Lubitsch (the Patriot) will direct him in an operetta.

The Voice of the City (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Irish love in a garret pads the complicated and somewhat disconnected framework of this story of a prisoner's escape and revenge. The old-line stage detective who is disagreeable until the last minute is played with remarkable gusto by Willard Mack, who also directed and wrote the picture. After the first performance in Manhattan, the following tribute appeared in an advertisement in the N. Y. World: "The Voice of the City . . . would fit any medium but is best as a talkie. . . . (signed) Willard Mack." Best shot: a living corpse dangling from a beam.

Loves of Casanova (French). Cut from 17 to seven reels, colored by hand, mercilessly expurgated, these episodic reminiscences of an 18th Century confidence-man invoke a dreariness entirely foreign to the life of the central character, but occasionally relieved by witty and good-humored subtitles written in the first person. Best shot: Casanova kissing a woman's hand.

Close Harmony (Paramount). John V. A. Weaver wrote most of the dialog and Elsie Janis the story of this picture. Designed with no higher aim than to give Buddy (Charles) Rogers a chance to play the saxophone, it turned out better than you would expect. Nancy Carroll splits up a vaudeville team by flirting with each member in turn so that Rogers can get their booking. Best shot: vaudeville love in the back seat of a car.

Saturday's Children (First National). The marriage, parting and reunion of Maxwell Anderson's hero and heroine -one of the best of all U. S. plays -becomes heavy and slow in this partly-vocal photograph directed with sincerity but without much vitality by Gregory La Cava. Corinne Griffith's voice, heard for the first time, is nasal, unattractive, but somehow memorable. Best shot: Miss Griffith getting her sweetheart to marry her.