The New Pictures

A Study in Scarlet (Fox). When National Broadcasting Co. presented A Study in Scarlet on the air, its Salt Lake City outlet indignantly cut off the instalment which cast a bloody light on certain early Mormon doings. In filming Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's thriller, Fox was evidently so concerned about injuring Mormon feelings that an entirely new and different story is told. Only the old rooms in Baker Street, the pipe, tweed cap and violin of sagacious Sherlock Holmes remain unaltered. New film Holmes is Reginald Owen, a twangy-voiced high comedian who gave theatregoers much pleasure in The Play's the Thing and Petticoat Influence.

A series of shocking murders is being perpetrated in London. Victims all appear to be members of a Scarlet Ring (instead of Mormon Elders), an organization which is liquidating a wholesale theft of jewels from the Imperial Chinese coffers. Victim to pay attention to is No. 3, a certain Captain Pyke. When a body is pulled out of the Thames, his wife (Anna May Wong) identifies it as her husband because of a peculiar ring the corpse is wearing. The diligently-coached Chinese-American actress remarks, in fact, with almost perfect aplomb: "It was an ancient heirloom belonging to my family in China. They gave it to 'um."

By now Holmes, using an electric torch instead of the traditional bull's-eye lantern, is hot on the trail. He ferrets around the underground passages and false doors of the Pyke country mansion, barely prevents the death of another member of the gang and of an innocent young girl (June Clyde), whose father had been associated with the Scarlet Ring. The gunfire having ceased, she is about to be married to her fiance. "Will you give me away?'' she asks Sherlock Holmes. "I never give a lady away," replies the gallant detective.

Exciting shot: the mysterious murderer, represented only as the eye of the camera, making a call on his evil accomplice.

Poil de Carotte (Pathe-Natan). From European studios have come by far the most searching film studies of childhood and adolescence. While Hollywood was planning some new caprice for Jackie Cooper, Berlin was turning out such cinematic masterpieces as Maedchen in Uniform and Emil und die Detektiv (not yet released in the U. S.). This French production (spoken in French with English subtitles) and the delicate performance of young Robert Lynen measure up to the high German standard.

He was not called Poil de Carotte because he really had red hair. It was simply another indignity slapped on him by his thoughtless family, a preoccupied father and a queer pinched mother who hated him so much that she did not hesitate to tell the servants that he was dirty, sullen and a liar. She terrified Poil de Carotte, who had come to her late in life and unwanted, widening the breach between her and her silent husband. The child was thin, big-eyed, hopelessly sensitive. The ecstasies of childhood, as well as its cruel injustices, its disappointments and aching loneliness, seized him with unusual violence. Brightest moment in Poil de Carotte's summer vacation from boarding school comes when he goes to visit his uncle, who lets him swim in a cold brook and then leads him and his little cousin, wreaths of weeds in their hair, in a wild dance to the music of a concertina across broad sunny fields. At home the routine is monotonously wretched. His thieving older brother and dull sister, the mother's favorites, get the melon. He is allowed to gnaw the rinds before being sent to feed them to the rabbits. He is abused for answering a question with bread in his mouth, laughed at for being afraid of the dark. The child's torture is made credible by the sly malice with which his unnatural mother administers it. One night Foil de Carotte does not pray his usual prayer that "Mme Lepic will forget about him for a little while." He begins to brood on suicide. Even next morning, when his father has him come to a party celebrating his election as village mayor, the desolate child finds himself suddenly abandoned, ridiculed for his cast-off clothing on what promised to be a day of days. In a barn he finds a rope. His father barely prevents a tragedy.

If you have not had to swallow a few times already you probably will during the final scene in which father and son get acquainted for the first time over an inn table, find that they have a great deal in common, both loathing the same woman.

"It will be different from now on, Francois." promises the contrite father, using Poil de Carotte's Christian name for the first time. "There are two of us. A votre sante!"

"A votre sante, papa," says tear-stained Poil de Carotte.

Goldie Gets Along (RKO-Radio) tells the familiar tale of the girl who tries to get to Hollywood by means of a beauty contest. In this case the girl is flaxen-haired Lili Damita and she enters more than one beauty contest. She enters a series of them promoted by one Muldoon (Sam Hardy) in various cities, always under a different name and always subsequent to having won over the local judges by her undeniable charm. It is then unscrupulous Muldoon's cue to offer her as the prize $1,000 or a non-existent ticket to Hollywood. Until the enterprising team reaches River Falls, Miss Damita habitually chooses the ticket to Hollywood, permitting her colleague to pocket the $1,000. At River Falls she asks for the $1,000, much to Muldoon's chagrin. After the usual ups and downs in the film capital she is promised a big part, but just then her sweetheart from New Jersey appears. Goldie renounces her career, leaving her producers, Muldoon and the plot up in the air.

Cocktail Hour (Columbia) relates the story of an artist (Bebe Daniels) who wants to live "the free life." Cynthia Warren is first seen in her studio putting the last touches on an advertising poster while admiring friends ply her with cigarets, drink and music. To the telephone calls of people begging for her work she is disdainfully aloof. Randy Morgan (Randolph Scott) is the only man Cynthia considers marrying. In spite of his pleading, she sails unwed for a vacation in Europe. En route she meets an attractive bounder (Sidney Blackmer) who dazzles her with poetic maunderings and the information that on his English estate there is a pool where Poets Byron and Brooke once swam. Also aboard is Olga (Muriel Kirkland), another self-made woman whose belief it is that "all men are alike. One day they kiss you; the next day they kick you.'' Cynthia blithely replies: "That's all right. You can see them every other day."

Her feeling is shaken when her caddish friend's wife meets and claims him as the liner docks. Persistent, he appears later in Paris where a Frenchman pushes him through a window. In the ensuing turmoil, Suitor Morgan turns up, no sooner, no later than the audience expects.

Below The Sea (Columbia). Beginning with a somewhat incredible premise, this picture shows a U. S. destroyer sinking a German submarine laden with $3,000,000 in gold in the South Seas during the War. Captain Schlemmer (Fredrik Vogeding) escapes with one shipmate, kills him on a desert island. Years later he ships with a lady oceanographer (Fay Wray) on her yacht bound for the site of the sunken treasure. Also along is a diver (Ralph Bellamy), who is at first more interested in his craft than in Miss Wray. The iniquitous Teuton, best actor in the cast, soon shows his stripe by trying to get all the gold for himself. He is dragged beneath the waves to his death for his pains. Love for the oceanographer comes to the diver when he goes to rescue her, trapped in a bathetic bathysphere by a giant octopus. Some of the submarine photography is excellent.

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