The New Pictures

The Devil to Pay (Goldwyn). The millions of young U. S. women whose admiration has made Ronald Colman the most important male star in pictures should find this almost perfect, because it is very long. It is a flippant and debonair little piece, written to order by Frederick Lonsdale. It exists for its manner, its atmosphere of "nice" people, its flashes of wit--Colman buying a wirehaired fox terrier; arguing with his father, the irascible Lord Leeland (Father: "Now you're blaming me for bringing you into the world." Son: "I should be mortified for your sake if I had to blame anyone else.") ; taking Loretta Young on a merry-go-round; accepting the -L-5,000 his fiancee hands him in the nasty belief that he loved her for her money. Colman is the prodigal younger son of a noble family. He comes home, attracts to himself a girl who was supposed to marry a Russian grand duke, and after difficulties weds her. The whole thing would be much better if it were faster and shorter but it is good entertainment as it stands. Best shot: the crowd going back to London after the Derby.

Danger Lights (RKO). For this first important release to be made with the new Spoor-Berggren wide film (TIME, Sept. 1). RKO has shrewdly chosen a story about railroading which gives the cameramen a chance to show the versatility of the new film by photographing locomotives from many angles. The big film seems exactly like other wide films; its mechanical grandeur, the magnified screen and the magnified size of everything thereon, are exciting and worthwhile, but not revolutionary. The story is the sort in which the district superintendent rescues an engineer from a drunken stupor by reminding him that lives depend on running the trains properly. It is a love-triangle, with Louis Wolheim as the heroic but unfortunate suitor, Robert Armstrong as the one who gets Jean Arthur in the end. Best shot: an express racing through life-sized valleys and hills to Chicago.

Tom Sawyer (Paramount). The Tom Sawyer of the printed page remains more real than any figure of flesh & blood concocted in his image, and for this reason there are people who will cavil at Paramount's cinema of him, or go with misgivings into a theatre to see him played, afraid that lies will be told about someone they know. Yet no lies are told in this picture. You can accept Jackie Coogan, you can accept the treatment which does all for the story that any cinema could do in the limits of program time--present its surface, the long lazy days and river night-falls of Hannibal, Mo. in 1870, and the adventures of some children there. Naturally, the adventures have been telescoped, but most of the best ones are left --Tom showing off for Becky Thatcher, being tortured by his conscience because he and Huck Finn and Joe Harper are in on the secret that Injun Joe and not old Muff Potter killed the doctor; playing pirate on a raft; coming to his own funeral. John Cromwell's direction is rapid and expert. The only weak spot is Huck Finn (Junior Durkin) who has been edged almost out of the story because a separate picture about him is going to be made soon. Best technical shot: speech used as a sound-accompaniment of action in the schoolroom scene, where the teacher keeps on talking while the camera follows more interesting things.

After an apprenticeship as a stage baby, Jackie Coogan, 4, was doing the shimmy in a vaudeville act with Annette Kellerman when Charles Chaplin, then meditating The Kid, put him on contract. After he had made 14 pictures Jackie's parents sent him to Loyola High School in Los Angeles. Now 16, he is in the junior class, weighs 95 lb., likes to wear white spats away from school. His allowance, until recently, was $20 per week when he was earning about $3,500 per week.

Sous les Toits de Paris (Film Sonora Co.). This pleasant little film in French is arranged according to the 1928 formula of U. S. talking pictures -- a formula which the French, like other European producers, have recently become able to imitate successfully. A theme song -- now obsolete in Hollywood -- is heartily employed, but "Sous les Toits de Paris" is a pretty song, gay and nostalgic ; it ought to be popular if native orchestras bother to work out a dance arrangement for it. The plot concerns a street-singer and a street-hawker who fall in love with the prettiest girl in their neighborhood. One of them wins her in spite of complications caused by a bully-boy who gets possession of a key to her apartment. The cast is not famous (Albert Frejean, Edmond Greville, Pola Illery), but they act so well that spectators do not have to understand French to follow the story. Best shot : the singer stimulating a crowd to sing while both men peddle their music in the street.

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