The New Pictures

Chances (First National) is a well-photographed, well-acted cinema which uses the War as a background for romance. Chief figures are two brothers and a girl with whom both are in love. She (Rose Hobart) falls in love with the more personable of the two (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) when he is home on leave. When the other brother learns of it, he loses interest in the War and, feeling thoroughly cheated, does not greatly object to being killed. Before dying, he shakes hands with the lucky brother who, severely wounded, goes back to England and the girl. Chances might have been a better cinema if fewer shots of wheels, particularly wheels with balloon tires, had been shown in those stenographic flashes which are as yet the only means the talkies have discovered to indicate motion from one place to another. Its somewhat sentimental story is by no means a novelty but the dialog is terse and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. has an English accent which, if he uses it at home, must make his father feel like a pants-presser.

Rose Hobart is a charming and intelligent actress, who is now on that treacherous middle ground between a successful debut (as Julie in Liliom) and stardom. By no means awed at this status, Cinemactress Hobart was in much the same position a year ago when, after making her second talkie (A Lady Surrenders), she returned to the stage whence she had been coaxed by Carl Laemmle Jr., who admired her in Death Takes a Holiday. Her face, not conventionally beautiful, photographs better when turned toward the camera than in profile. The charm of her low voice perfectly survives recording. Born Rose Kefer in Manhattan 25 years ago of musician parents (her father, a cellist; her mother, a singer) Miss Hobart was educated to be a concert pianist. Instead she became a proficient harpist. At 18 she married a theatrical scene designer, is now divorced. She is domestic, practical, thrifty; makes her own clothes, cooks well. She is a competent horsewoman, swimmer, diver.

Night Angel (Paramount). Director Edmund Goulding had too much respect for the story he had to tell, perhaps because he wrote it himself. It concerned a public prosecutor who befriends a pretty waif after he has caused her mother, a jolly old woman with bad connections, to be put in jail. Having befriended, he falls in love with her, kills a beer garden malefactor who mistreats her and is put on trial for murder. The waif gives the testimony which causes a jury to free him.

What Director Goulding wanted to do was to make a searching character study of everyone involved, to show the unhappy struggle with which the prosecutor attempted to justify to himself and the polite world in which he lived, an attachment for a seductive girl in an environment of thuggery and toss-potting. Like many another able artist, he attacked a theme too big for him. The result was a slow and trite melodrama, in which Fredric March, hampered by a small mustache and an air of being in a quandary, gave slow chase to Nancy Carroll who had so few opportunities to do anything that she became almost a permanent waif. Director Goulding laid the scene in Prague and used this as an excuse for producing, with elaborate shots of doorways, streets and stairways, a general air of German impressionism which would have been equally suitable to a wild west show. By ballyhooing this picture, Paramount only succeeded in making Nancy Carroll slightly ridiculous.

I Take This Woman (Paramount). Gary Cooper has the long mulish upper lip which, originally applauded under the nose of Bill Hart, has since become requisite for any cinemactor impersonating a taciturn but adventurous cowboy. In this picture, of which the formula was borrowed from Mary Roberts Rinehart, the cowboy so impresses an effete blonde playgirl (Carole Lombard) that, sent to her father's ranch for an alcoholiday, she stays on, marries the cowboy, spends a hard winter on his cattle farm. At this point, the picture trails off into a string of absurdly erratic episodes. The blonde package goes home and takes up with an old admirer. The cowboy joins a rodeo and gets thrown off his horse. Playgirl and cowboy are reconciled for a conclusion which seems unnecessarily delayed.

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