The New Pictures

An American Tragedy (Paramount) is courtroom melodrama, more morbid than exciting, in which chief interest centres on the efforts of a district attorney to bully a young scapegrace into making the conflicting statements which cause him to be convicted of first-degree murder. The first part of the picture somewhat sketchily outlines early episodes in the career of the murderer, Clyde Griffiths. He is shown as a bellhop, a tramp, a dishwasher, then as a foreman in the collar factory of a rich uncle. He seduces a factory girl, Roberta Alden, and attempts to desert her when he is attracted by Sondra Finchley, richer and correspondingly more interesting. When Roberta Alden tells Clyde Griffiths that she is going to have a baby, he is provoked to kill her--by taking her on a picnic, tipping over their rowboat, swimming to shore while she drowns.

The picture is derived from the monster novel by Theodore Dreiser. In his two tomes, Dreiser impeached not so much a pipsqueak libertine as the social order which produced him. Dissatisfied because the cinema failed to impeach similarly, Dreiser tried and failed to secure an injunction against its showing. But there are other and more important qualities which Dreiser got into his book and which Adapter Samuel Hoffenstein, light-versifier and onetime theatrical pressagent, and Director Josef von Sternberg failed to get into the picture.

Director von Sternberg, neither creator nor translator, had the insoluble problem of duplicating a masterpiece in a medium which it was not meant to fit. The string of hasty sequences with which the picture replaces the first volume of the novel fails to make Clyde Griffiths excitingly alive, "unless the spectator remembers the novel well enough to fill in the gaps. Titles, gloomily printed on a background of waves, interrupt the action more than they elucidate it. Phillips Holmes plays Clyde Griffiths in perfunctory fashion. He experiences every human emotion without varying his expression except by a toothy smile. At moments the picture transcends this and other handicaps and really comes to life. Walking with another girl, Roberta Alden passes Clyde Griffiths and says, "Don't look back. Don't look back," and then looks back herself. The first time Roberta goes canoeing with Clyde, Actress Sylvia Sidney, whose performance is brilliant, puts just the right intonations in her tiny, memorable speech: "I can't swim." But most of the time the picture wanders about in a maze of poorly acted, disintegrated incident which lacks the cumulative effect of Dreiser's ponderous prose. Dull shots: Phillips Holmes jumping out of a poolroom window when police arrive; smirking at a dance to show how much he likes high life; making bewildered, wooden attempts to seem amorous.

Phillips (Phillip Raymond) Holmes was a sophomore at Princeton in 1928 when Director Frank Tuttle, using the campus as a setting for Varsity, selected him for a small part. Previously he had attended seven preparatory schools, played a girl lead in a Princeton Triangle Club show (Napoleon Passes) with a flair which he might have inherited from his father, Actor Taylor Holmes. His faintly Barry-morose profile, wavy hair and controlled demeanor in the presence of a camera caused a demand for his services after Varsity. Friendship with Director Edmund Goulding helped him along. Not yet an adult actor, he intelligently avoids the boisterous tricks favored by most juveniles, but substitutes only perplexed inscrutability.

Huckleberry Finn (Paramount) is not so good a picture as Tom Sawyer was. Instead of letting John Cromwell, who directed Tom Sawyer, make the sequel, Paramount gave the job to Norman Taurog, who made Skippy. The cast is the same--Junior Durkin for Huckleberry Finn, Jackie Coogan for Tom Sawyer, Jackie Searl for Sid Sawyer, Mitzi Green (in a blonde wig) for Becky Thatcher. Director Taurog, while he retains many of the happiest Twain inventions, gives them a less sharply human inflection--almost as though he had been afraid that Mark Twain's conception of his own characters might seem, to contemporary audiences, a trifle quaint.

Huck is disgruntled at his best friend's interest in Becky Thatcher, discomfited when his disreputable father kidnaps and keeps him prisoner in a deserted shack. After his escape, Huck and Tom set off down the river on their raft. They rescue the two gamblers who have been thrown off a river boat and admire, for a time, the gamblers' methods of pretending to be the Duke of Bilgewater and his friend, the King. In the picture, the gamblers seem less engaging than they should be. Heavier thar the Twain touch is the one which the cinema lays upon the story. A few ill-advised incidents have comic-strip characteristics--a dog lapping up food which Tom Sawyer has unwisely placed on the floor, Huck jabbing the Duke of Bilgewater's rear with a pointed knife, Tom throwing apples at the King.

Traveling Husbands (RKO Radio). The traveling salesman, hero of innumerable smoking room stories, has been neglected in all other forms of fiction. This picture shows five travelling salesmen engaged in poker games, business enterprises, fly-by-night hospitalities which reach their climax when one of the salesmen is shot by a girl (Evelyn Brent) who is not the one he has been trying to seduce. Authentic in outline, and environment, Traveling Husbands gains little from the plot that is meant to make it exciting. Its best moments are those in which a sarcastic Hebrew lingerie merchant (Hugh Herbert) gurgles his impudent philosophy. Of his "prospects" he remarks: "They all look alike in the Turkish bath." Pathetically eager to make merry, he drapes himself in the furs and chiffons of his sample case, telephones to his wife,. in the manner of legendary traveling salesmen, with an amorous lady on his lap.

Young As You Feel (Fox) is a typical Will Rogers cinema. Waggishly embarrassed, he undertakes to disport himself in a silk-hat and long-tailed coat, criticize second rate statuary, attend night clubs, horse-races and a dancing class, gargling quiet wisecracks as he does so. The story, adapted from a play by George Ade called Father and the Boys, shows how a dyspeptic and chronically disgruntled businessman becomes revitalized in an effort to outdo his lively offspring. His sons suspect him of reckless conduct with a vivacious lady (Fifi Dorsay), suspect that his nose, withdrawn from the grindstone, will become tarnished by inebriation. Instead, his lively antics cause him to regain health and good spirits so thoroughly that he suggests a line for his own epitaph: "Died in his infancy."

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