The New Pictures

The Cock-Eyed World (Fox). Laurence Stallings and Maxwell Anderson wrote this sequel to What Price Glory. Like most sequels written to order and for the trade, it retains the flavor but not the vitality of the first piece. Still in the Marines, Sergeant Quirt and Top-Sergeant Flagg get their women mixed up again in Russia, Brooklyn, Coney Island, the tropics. Their dialog, consisting mostly of aggressive variations of the phrases "Says You" and "Says me," is amazingly rough for cinema, outshocks What Price Glory in places. One of the men gets wounded, the other leads his troops to glory. At the end they settle in their own way an argument as to which of them is the father of Lily Damita's child. Director Raoul Walsh, who himself acts the part of a Marine captain, gets music in by having the Marines play mouth organs, listen to instrumental concerts, and march, when possible, to bands. Best shots: disembarkation in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Say It With Songs (Warner). The sob that rose in Al Jolson's throat as he sang beside the bedside of Davy Lee in other pictures has grown louder, deeper. Now that sob, heard round the world, constitutes his whole repertory. In Say It With Songs he sings in jail, torn from his young wife, his little son, caroling to fellow-prisoners about the birds, the springtime. He has accidentally killed a fellow who was making advances to his wife. As soon as he is free a truck hurts Davy Lee and the wandering story that is a framework for his sob is washed out again with a flood of tears. Jolson sings well, although without burnt cork, which he really needs, such ditties as "Little Pal" and an old one, "Back in Your Own Back Yard." The rest of the numbers will need a lot of plugging to make you remember them. Best shot: Marion Nixon telling Jolson what the manager proposed to her. Silliest shot: a doctor refusing to operate on Little Pal unless Miss Nixon raises $5,000. Silliest song-line (to the convicts): "Violets from their seeds push their way up through the weeds: why can't you?"

Before he was 20, Asa Yoelson ran away from Washington, D. C, where he had learned to sing in the synagogue with his father, Cantor Yoelson. He got a job barking for a side-show with a country circus, later went into vaudeville and started blacking his face because he noticed that crowds always laughed at a black man. He worked with Dockstader's minstrels, then for the Shuberts. He was the first minstrel to get down on his knees when, in the chorus of a song, he came to the word "Mammy." Now a multimillionaire, third* richest actor in the world, he remains capricious, moody, fond of asserting his independence and of practical jokes. He likes to take long motor trips without planning them, starting at night for some distant point and singing on the way. His companions are usually less important showpeople who laugh at all his jokes. He gives money to beggars, is shrewd at driving bargains, has been known to refuse several thousand dollars to sing for five minutes at a private party on the ground that at a party his status must be either that of host or guest. His best shows were Bombo and Sinbad, his pictures The Jazz Singer and The Singing Fool. Last winter he improved his standing by marrying Ruby Keeler, a popular little tap-dancer tutored by Mary Louise (''Texas") Guinan.

The Man and the Moment (First National). Billie Dove re-establishes an oldtime tenet of picturemaking, to the effect that if an actress is good-looking enough she does not need to have stories written for her or to know how to act. Elinor Glyn was hired to make up some thing about a bride who gets out of her husband's stateroom on the wedding morning, but the plot is halfhearted, as though its famed authoress were conscious that her fatuities were required simply for the sake of convention. It is a picture for people who like love on yachts and among the members of High Society. Billie Dove, beautifully dressed, dark-eyed, slightly abstracted, seems only remotely concerned with it. Silliest shot: frustrated Rod La Rocque smashing a huge bowl ornamented with mermaids in action.

Hungarian Rhapsody (UFA). This German picture contains no dialog but its fiddles playing Magyar melodies are well recorded. Manufactured for the U. S. box office and released through Paramount, it tells about a middle-class girl who sacrifices herself for an impoverished and roguish nobleman because she respects his class. Stock characters of continental drama photographed with fine craftsmanship against their native background seem no more credible than in Hollywood pictures where this background has been artificially reproduced.

* Richest is David Warfield, who put his savings into Loew stock. Second richest is Eddie Cantor.