The New Pictures

Father and Son (Columbia). Psychologists and the writers of fairy stories agree that the relationship between children and their stepmothers is apt to be complicated. The word "stepmother" itself implies so familiar and important a dramatic situation that it is hard to understand how even the most garbled reproduction of it could be wholly untrue. Only by ignoring his real material in favor of claptrap borrowed from other pictures has Director Erie Kenton been able to remove all traces of reality from this story which is told in gasps of silence and badly recorded, preposterously written dialog.

In the trial denouement the little boy accused of murdering his bad stepmother is cleared by a device proving that she was killed by her lover. Typical shot: Mickey McBan, baby soprano, singing "My Daddy's the Best Daddy of All."

Honky Tonk (Warner). Alone on a vaudeville stage with a piano, Sophie Tucker is impressive. Although she sings with all the traditional embellishments of the three-a-day, her strong voice somehow manages to make trashy melodies sound like folk-songs. She makes even more noise than usual in this picture but without the effect she gets when she is closer to her audience. She is handicapped by her role as a night-club hostess, by bad songs, by a ridiculous story about her priggish daughter's love-affair with a bibulous millionaire. Long before the rich young man apologizes, the daughter stops being snobbish, and Miss Tucker spreads her thick pink arms to embrace both of them, it is apparent that Honky Tank is one more grotesque souvenir of the earliest manner of the sound device. Silliest shot: the hero insulting Miss Tucker.

Sophie Tucker used to be a waitress in the dining room of her father's hotel in Hartford, Conn. She was a fat, jolly girl, and the patrons of the Tucker House, many of them show people, told her she ought to go on the stage. They made fun of her deep, mournful voice, telling her they liked the way she sang. One night she ran away from home leaving a letter informing her father that she would never come back until she was famous. She plugged black-face songs in movie houses until, in 1907, she got a vaudeville contract at $12.50 a week. One day when she was in burlesque her trunk didn't come and she had to sing without her blackamoor makeup. Her comedy went over better.

She has been a headliner in vaudeville since 1910. She sang at Reisenvveber's in Manhattan, where a dining room was called The Sophie Tucker Room. The Prince of Wales and the Duke of York made friends with her when she sang at the Kit Kat Club in London.