The New Pictures

Three Rogues (Fox). While eluding agents of the law, a bank-robber (Victor McLaglen), a Mississippi river cardsharp (Lew Cody), and a kind-hearted cattle-rustler (Eddie Gribbon) meet up with a slip of a girl (Fay Wray). She is driving a covered wagon, and at the mercy of a villain. The three bad men, who have hair on their chests as well as their trousers, fall in love with her and although she refuses to marry any one of them, they save her from harm in the upstairs room of a cattle-town saloon, beat the villain in a race to stake the claim for her goldmine.

All this is accomplished with a prodigious uproar of breaking chairs, whiskey gurgling loudly into glasses, hoofs thumping on sandy but resonant footing--sounds which are almost as exciting as the pianoforte and snaredrum accompaniment which enlivened the inaudible rotogravure of oldtime westerns. Most typical shot: wagons lined up for the start of a land-rush, similar to that in Cimarron.

Dirigible (Columbia). The story of this picture, as is proper in such machine-age fantasies, serves merely to add point to the activities of aeronautical contrivances in spectacular locales. Two Navy aviators, one a dirigible expert (Jack Holt), one a speed and stunt flyer (Ralph Graves), make successive attempts to carry an indefatigable explorer to the South Pole. The dirigible breaks down and falls into the sea. The plane reaches the Pole but crashes landing on the ice. Its occupants start walking back and are rescued, just in time, by a new and better dirigible. Further motivation for the maneuvers of aircraft is supplied by the fact that the dirigible commander and the speed-flyer are both in love with the same girl--the speed-flyer's wife (Fay Wray). Good shots: a man having his frozen foot sawed off; parachutes opening under a balloon, like toy flowers in a glass of water; a dirigible's telephone switchboard.

Parlor, Bedroom and Bath (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Buster Keaton. a mild little fellow perpetually calm although astonished and afraid, was funnier in silent pictures than he is in talkies. Aware that his voice is not an instrument for comedy, he keeps silent as much as possible and this makes his efforts seem a little strained. In Parlor, Bedroom and Bath he plays the part of a timid ninny, caught in circumstances which demand that he behave like a libertine. The result is a struggle with three amorous ladies, a chase through hotel corridors, a farce which is neither very vulgar nor very funny.

Skippy (Paramount). The activities of Skippy, a sly, skeptical and lazy ten-year-old, clad in an unbuttoned coat and critical of his confreres, have long been pursued in the comic-strips of famed Anti-Prohibitionist Percy Crosby. In the cinema, Skippy is impersonated by Jackie Cooper, of whom Cartoonist Crosby says: "I think he's really got the spirit of the thing." His pal, Sooky, is played by Robert Coogan, Jackie's little brother. Other children are played by Jackie Searle and Mitzi Green.

There is no plot. The story is simply the small odyssey of Skippy's daily doings, his efforts to sleep late in the morning, his methods of evading disagreeable duties, his insouciance toward the adult idea of how children ought to act. He promises his parents not to go over the railroad tracks to Shanty Town, aware that he can get to Shanty Town by going under them. Most exciting is his effort to retrieve Sooky's dog, impounded by the dog catcher. Skippy has promised his mother not to "touch" his savings bank, so he drags it onto a road, gets it open by having a truck run over it. He and Sooky offer the money to the dog-catcher who takes it, but kills Sooky's dog nonetheless.

Perplexed, erratic, gay, often reprehensible, Skippy will perhaps appear in a series of later cinemas. If these are like the first, they will win many an adult audience with reminiscences of somewhat similar mongrel puppies, similar scuff-toed urchins in still forbidden Shanty Towns.

Eleven years younger than his famed brother Jackie Coogan (The Kid, Oliver Twist), Robert Coogan has much the same woe-begone appearance, the same round eyes which appear to have been inserted with a smutty finger. He impudently refused to act in Skippy until cajoled by his brother and his parents, who were once part of Diver Annette Kellerman's vaudeville act but are now supported by their young. Unable to read, Robert Coogan learned his part by having it read to him. He really cried when Sooky lost his mongrel dog. He refused to fight Jackie Searle till called a "chicken." Robert Coogan greatly admires his brother (now 16, unemployed, with an office in Los Angeles), prays earnestly for anyone in trouble, prefers playing with trains to acting, "which makes him mad."

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