The New Pictures

Wall Street (Columbia). Spectators who wonder whether the timeliness of this film's background--a stockmarket panic--is the result of extraordinary financial foresight or extraordinary speed in production should be informed that it is simply luck. In plot and characters Wall Street is less lucky. It presents the fundamentally interesting but familiar and clumsily treated situation of an iron-sinewed, low-born trader who is in love with a beautiful, cultured woman. Ralph Ince and Aileen Pringle do as well as they can in these parts. Silliest shot: a ruined speculator committing suicide by jumping through an office window after a brief soliloquy.

The Taming of the Shrew (United Artists). When Shakespeare made characters out of medieval chronicles just like the living English people he knew, and wrote words for them which often sounded like real talk in spite of being broken up into iambic lines, he was doing what the producers of this cinema have done in their turn. They have created no pedantic replica of Elizabethan comedy, but a vivid, hilarious farce. They have paid Shakespeare the double compliment of using hardly a word that he did not write and of brightening his meaning with new pieces of pantomime that are exactly Elizabethan because they are slapstick. They have translated into exquisite physical imagery the Padua which Shakespeare could not manage on the bare boards of his stage. The Taming of the Shrew is Douglas Fairbanks' first all-talking picture and the first picture in which he has ever appeared with Mary Pickford. His lusty voice, individual because it has never been trained, makes the voices of the schooled actors who play with him seem prosy and lifeless. He has a fine time swaggering in Petruchio's pointed shoes, but his wife outplays him. She proved in Coquette that in spite of 20 years in silent stories she could talk a difficult emotional role better than most contemporary stage actresses. Now she is Katherine from head to heels--a stormy, pretty vixen with just a shadow of pout left to remind you that she was once called "America's Sweetheart." Lucky children will be taken by wise parents to see this Taming of the Shrew during Christmas holidays. Best shot: the marriage scene of Katherine in her fine gown and Petruchio who comes late to church, in Fool's motley, eating an apple.

The Vagabond Lover (RKO). Songster Rudy Vallee has always had trouble in executing the flourishes of bonhomie expected of band leaders. He once tried being master of ceremonies in Paramount stage shows but his employers soon realized that his almost inaudible and apologetic announcements detracted from his lure. His present attempt at acting is framed in an improbable story of a small-town band that comes to fame by masquerading as a famed jazz orchestra, and a bandleader who attracts a society girl. It reveals once more Vallee's painful discomfort when required to do anything but croon love songs or play the saxophone. The film is helped by the presence of Marie Dressier in a comedy role written specially for her and having little to do with the plot. Vallee's makeup has been put on carelessly in many scenes. He looks homelier than he really is but his voice registers smoothly when he croons "If You Were the Only Girl in the World," "I'll be Reminded of You," "I Love You, Believe Me, I Love You," and "A Little Kiss Each Morning." Best shot: Marie Dressler's idea of how an aristocratic lady handles a chiffon handkerchief.

Hubert Prior Vallee avoided working in his father's drugstore in Westbrook, Me., by playing the saxophone in New England cabarets and theatres. He transferred from the University of Maine to Yale (class of 1927) and played at nights to pay his way. He led the big football band in the Yale Bowl. When he got out he went on earning $60 a week with his saxophone for a while, then organized an orchestra of his own. Moderately successful in Manhattan cabarets, he began to broadcast. Soon hundreds, then thousands of letters a week arrived for him in care of radio studios. Many were from young women: "Dear Rudy. . . . Dear Mr. Vallee. . . . Dearest Rudy. . . . Hello Rudy. ... I wonder why the dear Lord gave such a voice as yours to only one person. . . . Will you sing. . . . I have a picture. . . . I love . . . it. thrills me. ... hope you don't mind. . . . Sometimes I get so. . . ." The love-hungry female public began to crowd theatres and wait at railroad stations to see him. Rudy Vallee began to make $10,000 a week. Incisive, businesslike, wary, he has no hobbies, works hard. In his respectable Manhattan night-club-- Villa Vallee--he plays till early in the morning, then sleeps for a while, gets up early to make records in the morning, broadcasts at noon. Beside this routine he works in vaudeville or cinema house appearances. He has made one other picture--a short sound-feature. His early admiration for Rudy Wiedoeft's saxophone ability gave him the nickname "Rudy." His hair is reddish.

The Sacred Flame (Warner). The mother of a young man crippled in the War had made an agreement with him that when his life became too bitter to endure she would help him end it. In human terms such a situation is too terrible to say much about; in theatrical terms it is so terrible that it would be easy to say too much about it. When he wrote The Sacred Flame Somerset Maugham showed his recognition of these difficulties. He wrote his story for a single scene--the one in which the mother explained her position in a single long speech so movingly written that it made The Sacred Flame important as a play. But the gist of that speech was too hazardous for the cinema, and the producers, apparently frightened by their temerity in attacking the subject at all, had Pauline Frederick mumble a few words that explained little. With its climax gone, The Sacred Flame becomes nebulous and dull. Best part: Lila Lee as the cripple's wife who falls in love with his brother.

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