The New Pictures

Out All Night (Universal) is, as the title suggests, a timidly salacious little comic-strip, showing that its producers do not believe Tsar Will Hays's latest pronunciamento that "The general public today demand higher, not lower . . . standards from the screen." It shows an overgrown lout named Ronald Colgate (George "Slim" Summerville) trying to escape from the apron strings of an idiotically devoted mother (Laura Hope Crews) long enough to pay court to the nurse (Zasu Pitts) in a department store depositary for infants. When Ronald finally manages to marry his inamorata, Mrs. Colgate follows them to Niagara Falls on their honeymoon, spoils their fun. Finally friends of the young couple arrange to have Ronald witness his wife being abducted. This leads him to leap out of the wheel chair to which his mother has reduced him, establish his independence by a rescue. Laura Hope Crews who played a serious version of the same role in The Silver Cord does as well as anyone possibly could with Mrs. Colgate. The picture is a minor injustice to her as well as to Zasu Pitts, whose woeful eyes, Lady Macbeth hands and forlorn nervous meanings have made her celebrated as Hollywood's only sad comedienne.

Zasu (from the names of her father's sisters, Eliza and Susan) Pitts grew up at Santa Cruz, Calif., went to Hollywood in 1917, tried to get jobs as a serious actress. The only director who would give her one after her performance in Mary Pickford's Little Princess was Erich von Stroheim. Her treatment of a lugubrious part in Greed convinced him that she was the "ablest tragedienne in Hollywood." and she got the sad role of the mother in All Quiet on the Western Front. That film was previewed at a Hollywood theatre just after a Zasu Pitts comedy. When the audience was moved to reminiscent laughter by the sight of her face, the producers cut her out of the picture, remade the parts in which she had appeared.

Once married to a Los Angeles sportsman named Thomas Gallery, Zasu Pitts has two children: her own daughter, Ann, and the 10-year-old son of the late Barbara La Marr whom she arranged to adopt two days before Miss La Marr's death. Reconciled to the fact that audiences will always find her writhing hands, her quavering voice, even her tragic smile peculiarly funny, she now sticks to comic roles, will presently appear in Maids a la Mode.

Zoo in Budapest (Fox). The most important things in this picture are. of course, the animals--forlorn tigers prowling in their tiny cages, a blackfaced grey gibbon nibbling a bun with sophisticated gestures, a stampeding elephant who wrecks the lion house. But the people are exciting too. There is a sentimental young attendant (Gene Raymond) who amuses himself when lonely by holding long talks with the chimpanzees and who burns as many fur neckpieces as he can steal from visitors. There is a girl (Loretta Young) who, facing a five-year occupational school course in hide-curing, runs away one day when her class is making its weekly visit to the animals. At nightfall the girl and the attendant, fleeing arrest for his fur filching, and a small boy (Wally Albright

Jr.) escaping from his governess, hide together in a bear pit. As the evening wears on, Raymond saves the girl from a halfwit who tries to attack her, gets hurt rescuing the child from one of the tigers loosed by the rampaging elephants. The child's parents are so grateful that it begins to look as though the fortunes of his two companions may improve.

It is difficult to communicate the charm of so fanciful a story as Zoo in Budapest --a charm which lies less in the narrative than in Rowland Lee's expert 'direction and in the fine camera work of Photographer Lee Cannes who last winter received the Cinema Academy's Award for his work in Shanghai Express. First of a series of eight pictures being made at Fox studios by an individual producing unit under Paramount's onetime Vice President Jesse Lasky, Zoo in Budapest should excite interest in forthcoming Lasky productions, of which The Warrior's Husband, Berkeley Square and a picture by Preston Sturges, to be called The Power & the Glory, have been announced. During the manufacture of Zoo in Budapest, the Fox studio in Hollywood contained the third largest menagerie in the U. S. The animal most amenable to direction was the gibbon (Amos), who is accustomed to camera work. Most intractable was a supercilious warthog. In one scene a woman visitor complains about the smell of the animals. The wart-hog gives her a derisive sniff. Director Lee produced the proper expression by offering the wart-hog a carrot, substituting a piece of raw beef to make him disgusted.

The Mind-Reader (Warner). Chandra Chandler (Warren William), alias Chandra the Great, Dr. Munro and the Great Divoni, starts as a fortune-teller in county fairs. He marries a smalltown girl (Constance Cummings), gives up his profession because she disapproves of it, resumes it after being a failure at selling brushes. His assistant (Allen Jenkins) functions as an impudent chauffeur who gathers from the councils of his confreres in garages the information that enables Chandra to become a highly successful wizard, particularly adept at telling suspicious wives where their husbands spend the hours after work. Chandra's precarious prosperity ends when one of the husbands pays him an indignant call. Presently Chandra is being led off for two years in the penitentiary, for killing his visitor in self-defense.

The dialog for The Mind-Reader, written by the late Wilson Mizner and Robert Lord, is a good example of the reportorial comedy-melodrama school, but the brash antics of Allen Jenkins are the most amusing thing about the picture. He takes money from both his employers for keeping their doings secret from each other, gives a fellow chauffeur $5 for information which Chandra can resell for $1,000.

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