The New Pictures

Pleasure Crazed (Fox). This finely made but curiously colorless picture is an example of the talkie producers' fumbling to find a middle ground between stage and cinema. It attempts no broad effects, no cardinal emotions. Its plot, involving a novelist whose wife is unfaithful to him and who finds solace in the love of a girl who has been planted in his house by a gang of crooks, is as complicated as it sounds, yet never quite silly and never vulgar. A drama of manner is intended. The dialog, written by Clare Kummer, is civilized. The settings are beautiful; the cast, bought from the legitimate theatre and including Marguerite Churchill and Kenneth MacKenna, takes pains with its material. The result is tedious because the medium is still too crude for the effect attempted. You sorely miss the old-fashioned bathos of those pictures which tried hard, however ineptly, to make you cry or wriggle with excitement. Typical shots: Frederick Graham, cinema's best butler, bringing Captain Dean (Kenneth MacKenna) the roses a philandering polo player has sent up for Mrs. Dean.

Dangerous Curves (Paramount). It would not be fair to apply the term stale to this story about a circus performer who loses his skill when his female partner breaks up the team. Long ago it passed from being simply stale to an honorable status as one of the great stencils of picturemaking. Long research has proved that there are two ways in which the shaken fellow can be redeemed: 1) by the return of his original partner; 2) by another girl in the company who has loved him all the time but whose sacrifices have never been appreciated until the night when, as he lies drunk, she takes his place on the tightrope. Dangerous Curves employs Solution No. 2. Clara Bow gets the kiss in the fadeout. She is a better actress than her usual It-girl role would lead you to expect, but in most of her scenes she is not trying to act so much as to suggest, rather over-consciously, how "cute" she is. Best shot: Kay Francis in front of a bedroom door.

Twin Beds (First National). Comedian Jack Mulhall, who used to act only with Dorothy Mackaill, herein plays opposite Patsy Ruth Miller, supported by a good cast. The story is one of those anecdotes generally used as a framework for the less profitable shows of minor burlesque circuits. Miss Miller's frustrated ambition to sleep in a bed beside her husband's on her wedding night might have been funny in spite of everything but for the dialog--line after awkward line recited in singsong and divided from the next by little fences of silence. Twin Beds is partially redeemed by one tune, "If You Were Mine" and by a few seconds of Zasu Pitts as a half-witted servant-girl. Typical shots: a drunk caught in a revolving door; Miss Miller's stage father falling off a piano stool.

Piccadilly (British). People who liked The Old Wives' Tale may be startled at the idea of Arnold Bennett writing a film for Gilda Gray. And people who liked the Follies of 1922 may think it odd that Shimmy-Dancer Gray would appear in a story by Litterateur Bennett. Yet there is nothing in the collaboration to wonder at. Having made her name with her hips, with increasing maturity Miss Gray now takes acting seriously, while Mr. Bennett, having begun with masterpieces, now writes pamphlets on health, testimonials for advertising and sentimental stories for the Saturday Evening Post. This Gray-Bennett piece tells how a cabaret owner tries to get rid of his star dancer to replace her with his Chinese kitchen maid. The rivalry of the two girls winds up with a dagger-fight between them in the rooms of Anna May Wong. Like most English pictures, the drama is crudely shaped and conventionally directed. Anna May Wong does the best acting. Gilda Gray does not have much chance to dance. The best shots are incidental ones of sinister little streets in Limehouse and Soho.

The Oppressed (French). Never at her best even in the comparative intimacy of a theatre because she needs a smaller place, a cabaret where she can count on every inflection of her face and voice, Raquel Meller acts like a phantom for the camera's phantom audience. Her gestures are uncertain and stylized, yet she does not seem to be a phantom of herself but of some other actress, perhaps Bernhardt, perhaps Duse. Bernhardt made a cinema 17 years ago that was a good deal like this.* It was a costume drama too, and even with the experimental craftsmanship of the time hardly more sketchy and grandiloquent than The Oppressed, where the daughter of the Spanish High Constable to the Netherlands is in love with the leader of the oppressed Flemings. The photography might be 20 years old and so might the sword fights, the kisses in jail, the pursuit on horseback, the Inquisition, the pardon delivered at the scaffold by the king's messenger. Only good shot: Raquel Meller crossing herself in bed when her dog, startled by a flash of lightning, begins to bark.

Like most children of well-to-do peasants in the Basque country, Raquel Meller was educated in a convent. Unlike most convent-educated children she decided to become a nun. The night before she was to take her vows she felt her decision was wrong and climbed over the convent wall to the highroad that ran to Saragossa, Spain. She walked along the road getting her meals where she could. In the back rooms of country saloons she amused fishermen by singing hymns--the only songs she knew. One saloonkeeper gave her two pesetas an evening to stay in his place for a month. Six years later her fame had spread all over Spain. She performed for King Alfonso XIII the recitations, part song, part story, that she made up herself: a princess's duenna; a Sevillian madcap at a fiesta; a Catalan mother singing to her child, going crazy when it dies and singing to the empty cradle; a violet peddler; a matador's wife. When she sang in the U. S. three years ago her contract stipulated $6,000 per week, free rooms and transportation, permission to take her five pet dogs with her wherever she went, and guaranteed that she would not be criticized unfavorably. She was once reported engaged to Andre Roanne, French cinemactor. Once she was sued by a Paris jeweller for failing to pay two million francs for a necklace she bought herself.

* Queen Elizabeth, presented by Adolph Zukor in 1912.