The New Pictures

Young Sinners (Fox). Thomas Meighan quit the film business in 1929, spent a year travelling around the world, playing golf, meeting people. He found leisure boring and the Fox company thought this play, which it had on file, would give him just what he wanted to do. He wears corduroy breeches, a mackinaw, and a woodsman's boots and cap. He hums "The Rr-hiver Shannon" and when, with his broad brogue, he asks "What's the matter with Al Smith?" the audiences in Democrat towns start clapping. The picture is a comedy which critics passed off with an indulgent phrase or two when it was given as a play on Broadway last year but which the public unaccountably transformed into a hit. It is a better movie than it was a play, for the sequences showing the dissipations of very young and very rich characters do not suffer the stage's three-walled circumscription. Meighan does no sinning. He is an Adirondack guide entrusted with the job of making a man out of Hardie Albright and keeping him off liquor long enough to be a respectable groom for Dorothy Jordan. She is the poetic, crinoline type of heroine whom no one can associate with sinful doings. Meighan is all right in his role, though too often his lines are sappy. Most tiresome shot: Albright registering the fascination he finds in a Bourbon bottle.

Indiscreet (United Artists). Composed by the able musicomedy firm of De Sylva, Brown & Henderson, and containing one song that ought to be a hit, this picture is not, except for moments when Gloria Swanson sings, a musicomedy, but a legitimate drawing room piece with a bright idea. Miss Swanson's indiscretion--a love-affair with that cad, Monroe Owsley--gives her trouble later when she is in love with the worthy Ben Lyon and finds her young sister in Owsley's toils. There are bad stretches of development: the meeting between Lyon and Swanson, a giggling scene with Swanson and Barbara Kent that is supposed to be so very jolly, and many other moments when Swanson shows a tendency toward coyness not at all becoming to her years. Indiscreet is uneven, but its moments of farce lift some of the curse of coyness. Hilarious is the scene with the ice cream cones, which starts when Swanson spies a child who is crying because he has spilled his cone on the sidewalk. Hilarious are the window breaking scenes, and the scenes in which Swanson tries to live up to the rumor that there is a dash of insanity in her family. It is too bad that a picture which is really good entertainment should suffer from sloppy photography (e.g. the shot of Swanson drying herself in a towel robe after a shower, in which the spectator is allowed to discover that she has been taking a shower in a brassiere). Too free play has been given to the famed Swansonian mannerisms, goo goo eyeing and curling her upper lip to show off her teeth. Best shot: the fadeout, with Miss Swanson dreaming blissfully in the arms of a ship's officer whom she has mistaken for her fiance.

Like Marion Davies and Bebe Daniels. Gloria Swanson is one of those seasoned cinema wheel-horses who, though they pass through periods of taking themselves seriously, still do their best work in comedies. Gloria Swanson got her start in a striped, form fitting bathing suit in the old Mack Sennett pie & water works. Once Chaplin refused to allow her a bit in His New Job because she was too solemn. Her sense of humor has now developed to the point of sending bundles of old newspapers to the staterooms of friends sailing for Europe with the greeting: "Just something to read. . . ." However, she sculpts a little and writes verse. Her singing is surprisingly good. For her next picture she is deciding between two serious pieces--Rockabye, an unpublished English play, and Love Goes Past by Ursula Parrott.

Virtuous Husbands (Universal). "Remember that your wife is a shrinking violet," wrote Pansy Pomeroy, conductor of a colyum of advice to the lovelorn, in one of the countless letters of guidance which she left her son, Elliott Nugent. So in a hotel in Niagara Falls, while his wife is waiting for him in bed, Nugent sleeps on a sofa in the parlor. This honeymoon scene was the one which the audience, like the bride, had been looking forward to, but it is staged so much in the spirit of good clean Will-Haysian fun that it loses even the little vitality it had in the stage piece, Apron Strings, from which the scenario is adapted. Expert playing manages to make the story funny in a way that is partly meek, partly blatant. Nugent does not begin to behave humanly until friends have taken his mother's letters away from him. Jean Arthur, Allison Skipworth and Tully Marshall all work hard, and their combined efforts might have made a very funny piece indeed if the producers had had nerve. Typical sequence: the relatives of the wife, who had gone home, searching the husband's house for the letters.

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