The New Pictures

Bad Girl (Fox) tells a humble story humbly. A radio salesman, responding less to his own inclination than to her advances, makes friends with a pretty girl, seduces her with pleasure tinged by pessimism, marries her with love but some reluctance when her brother turns her out for coming home late. The picture, derived from Vina Delmar's best seller in 1928, might have been chilled by the sententious attitude with which cinema often apologizes for its attempts at realism. Instead, it is as intimate as the gossip on a fire-escape, as interesting as a secret. Director Frank Borzage (Seventh Heaven) gave the story just the treatment it needed to make its developments seem as important as though they had happened to people whom you know -- as, in outline, they must have happened to some acquaintance of almost every cinemaddict in the U. S.

Bad Girl is flippantly human, sad with out being solemn or more than pardonably sentimental. When the girl (Sally Eilers) falls in love with the salesman, she reveals the state of her emotions by saying "Gee, but you're a funny guy!" Other good shots: Sally Eilers, feeling so guilty because she is going to have a baby that she cannot get excited over a new apartment; James Dunn, also feeling guilty about the baby, trying to persuade an expensive doctor to attend his wife.

Florenz Ziegfeld once called Sally Eilers the most beautiful brunette in Hollywood. She had her real wedding dress copied for her role in Bad Girl; like the girl in the picture, she lived in Manhattan until, after being in the Follies, she became a cinemactress. She likes giving dinner parties, driving the three airplanes which belong to her husband, Cowboy-Actor Hoot Gibson. Like James Dunn, who used to be a sales man of portable lunch wagons, played a small part in Sweet Adeline, and has a clause in his contract saying he must weigh less than 157 Ibs., she is likely, on the strength of her performance in Bad Girl, to be a star in her next picture.

Bought (Warner) will be particularly pleasing to admirers of the Bennett family. Father Richard Bennett, altered by a monstrous Gothic nose, plays the part of a ladies' apparel buyer who makes friends with a model and finds, as his friendship progresses, that she is his illegitimate daughter. Daughter Constance Bennett plays the part of the model. She is rude to her old and platonic admirer. She prefers circulating in a socialite environment, notably at Newport where she is "untrue to herself" with the assistance of a cub socialite. Penitent, she breaks her engagement with him, promises to be true to a level-headed young writer, and recognizes, for no very good reason, the old cloak & suit buyer as her father. Well-mounted, directed and acted, Bought is acceptable though severely commonplace entertainment. Silly shot: a cross-section of the model's bookshelf, intended to indicate that she loves good books, showing adjacent volumes by Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Galsworthy, Michael Arlen.

Silence (Paramount) is an oldfashioned melodrama, packed with episodes of a kind which are usually called ''good theatre" to indicate that they have small resemblance to life. A crook (Clive Brook) on the point of being executed for murder, confesses to a priest. His confession, which constitutes the main portion of the picture, shows that, though innocent, he is maintaining a pretense of guilt to shield his daughter (Peggy Shannon). Good shot: a kitten playing with the ball of wool under which the crook has cached a roll of stolen money.

Men Are Like That (Columbia) is a distressing but feeble commentary on situations of social discord in an outlying Army post. Jilted by a dashing lieutenant (John Wrayne), the girl (Laura La Plante) marries his friend, who is a colonel. Later, to preserve the morals of her young sister, she compromises the lieutenant so seriously that he nearly loses his commission. Based on Augustus Thomas' play Arizona, which was produced in 1899, Men Are Like That seems a needless survival of an insignificant intrigue. A typically trite shot is the one with which the picture starts: an Army-Navy football game which the hero wins by kicking a field goal.

Sporting Blood (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) has to do with a racehorse named Tommy Boy. Bred on a Kentucky farm, he is sold successively to a pot-bellied stable owner, a spendthrift with a petulant wife, a gambler who dopes him to win a race. When the gambler is murdered after a misunderstanding with his confreres, his mistress inherits the horse, winters him on the farm where he was bred, enters him in the Kentucky Derby. Gamblers try to fix this race also; but Tommy Boy's owner has a stable boy cut a notch in the reins so that, when the jockey tries to hold him back, Tommy Boy breaks the reins, wins the race. Most race-track pictures sentimentalize both horses and humans even more than this one, which is, on the whole, exciting, interesting, occasionally authentic. Subsidiary stories about humans surround the chronicle of Tommy Boy. His last owner, the gambler's mistress, is deeply attached both to Tommy Boy and to a young gambler who, regenerate in the last reel, informs her stable-hands of the plot which he has helped to formulate. Shots of Elmendorf, Joseph E. Widener's farm near Lexington, Ky.; the 1931 Derby at Churchill Downs; of Vice President Curtis (a onetime jockey) marching down the clubhouse steps; and the sounds of a radio announcer mingling the names of real Derby horses (Spanish Play, Sweep All) with fictitious ones (Tommy Boy, Bar Sinister), help make the atmosphere of Sporting Blood less spurious than is customary. So does the performance of Clark Gable, who impersonates the young gambler with that air of reckless, good-humored depravity which has made him an overnight favorite among female cinemaddicts.

Born in Cadiz, Ohio 30 years ago, Cinemactor Gable got his first stage experience as prop-boy in a stock company. He got his broad shoulders at a lumber camp after the stock company disbanded at Portland, Ore. An impressively ugly stage performance as Killer Mears in The Last Mile caused Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to select him for subordinate roles in half a dozen gangster pictures. In A Free Soul he was the gangster whose rude but persuasive gallantries caused Norma Shearer to violate the Producer's Code.* Nicknamed "Dutchy," Actor Gable receives more letters than any other male star in Hollywood, hopes to retire in ten years, likes horses. A salad named after him is made of lettuce, grapefruit, cottage cheese.

*Stating the moral requirements and restrictions governing U. S. cinema productions and theoretically adhered to by the (Hays) Motion Picture Producers & Distributors of America, Inc.

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