The New Pictures

Street Girl (Radio). This first venture into the movie business of Radio Corp. of America has no air of being an experiment. The principals--Jack Oakie and Betty Compson--are experienced film actors; the plot, involving jealousy in a song-and-kiss troupe, is the main staple of the current season. The tunes are like hundreds of other tunes you've heard, and the fantastic lives, childish problems, and unreal reactions of the characters belong to a type familiar to cinema-seers since 1910. A girl from one of those Graustarkian Balkan kingdoms changes the destinies of the boys from the jazz orchestra who find her penniless in a U. S. city. Only good shots: the orchestral quartet putting on its act.

The Single Standard (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Greta Garbo usually manages to make her roles real no matter how badly written they are. This story about a fashionable woman who insists on the right to make her own mistakes is better than most of such stories. The idea out of which grow its romantic, typically cinematic situations is also the basis of a moment of drama. Greta Garbo has had a love-affair with her chauffeur who committed suicide because he was afraid of spoiling her life. Then she runs away with a painter and has a fine time sailing around on his yacht in warm weather until she finds out that he has tired of her. The moment when she is trying to understand that this has happened is what makes you remember the picture. She goes down to her cabin and stands in front of the wash basin. Because she is standing there she starts to wash her hands, then all of a sudden, to keep from crying, sticks her head in the basin and begins to wash her hair. When her sweetheart comes in and hands her the towel she is groping for she pretends to him that everything is all right. She convinces you then that she has complete knowledge of her part, and you accept without much argument the later scenes in which, marrying a mild fellow ashore, she finally molds herself to convention.

The Fight for Matterhorn (German). Knowing that audiences all over the world have been bored by faked scenes illustrating the perils of Alpine mountaineering, the producers of The Fight for Matterhorn did not dare to let their fly-like heroes start up the icy ledges until they had roped them together with a story. The anecdote they devised is a silly one about two men who were racing to see which of them could get up Matterhorn first, and how one suspected the other of wanting his wife. Hollywood scenarists could have got out something much better, but no Hollywood company has taken bet ter mountain-scenes than these. No miniature-sets and no doubles are used. You see the actors swinging over precipices thou sands of feet high, hooking spiked shoes into glassy walls. Best shot: Peter Voss getting to the top.

River of Romance (Paramount) is Booth Tarkington's Magnolia made into an ironical costume talkie with some big laughs and fine strutting in it. Wallace Beery is the Mississippi gambler who believes that the best way to lick people is to scare them and who wears over one eye a piratical black patch which he put there when his wife hit him with a hymnbook. Charles ("Buddy") Rogers is the quiet southern boy who learns from Beery, how to swagger, after the people in his home town had run him out for being a scare-cat. June Collyer is the drawling girl he loses in the beginning and Mary Brian the one he wins when he comes roaring home. Best shot: Beery ordering ham and eggs after shooting two enemies.

Evangeline (United Artists). Long fellow's forest primeval, the pines and the hemlocks murmurous for generations with the voices of schoolchildren reciting, have been decoratively imagined and prettily photographed by Director Edwin Carewe. Through her misfortunes Dolores Del Rio, a nostalgic, brunette Evangeline, longs for her absent lover in silence except when she is singing. To make the story acceptable for exportation, the idea that the Acadians were turned out by an unbalanced governor-general acting without authority has been sketched in; you have a glimpse of William Pitt denouncing the outrage in the House of Commons. Though it is doubtful whether Director Carewe's scenes reflect very accurately the sombre events they are supposed to show, they certainly reflect them as accurately as the verse of which they are such handsome illustrations. Good shots: the Acadians getting into their boats on a foggy morning; Miss Del Rio rigged up as an old woman for the scene at Roland Drew's deathbed.