The New Pictures

Lilly Turner (First National), played by Ruth Chatterton, is a small town girl whose first marriage turns out disastrously when she learns that her husband, a loud-mouthed magician, is a bigamist. A bibulous sideshow barker (Frank McHugh) marries her to save her from the disgrace of having an illegitimate child and Lilly Turner spends the rest of the picture gloomily giving him money to buy whiskey. They leave their carnival and join a medicine show in which the strong man becomes so inflamed by the sight of Miss Chatterton's legs in silk tights that he goes mad and is removed to an asylum. Lilly Turner consoles herself for her husband's dipsomania and the sad tenor of her existence by having an affair with the strong man's more personable successor (George Brent). She is about to run away with him when there occurs the one moment in Lilly Turner that possesses an element of dramatic action. The lunatic strong man escapes from his asylum and throws the barker through a window. Lilly Turner stays with the medicine show to nurse him. Her lover stays on also, hoping that circumstances may improve.

Ruth Chatterton's main fault as an actress is that, however deplorable her circumstances may be, she remains a lady. Thus the most spurious moment in this picture is the one which shows Lilly Turner hunched drunkenly on the front seat of the medicine show truck which her lover is driving, guzzling whiskey out of a pint bottle and confessing, with improbably heroic hiccoughs, that she has a Past.

The Life of Jimmy Dolan (Warner) concerns principally a rowdy, champagne-guzzling prize-fighter (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) who kills a reporter with a blow of his fist on the night that he wins the light heavyweight championship of the world. His manager, running away in the fighter's car, gets burned to death in an accident; his charred corpse is mistaken for the fighter's. This gives the fighter a chance to change his name from Jimmy Dolan to Jack Daugherty. He wanders out West as a hobo until he comes to a happy little farm where a girl named Peggy (Loretta Young) and her old Scotch aunt (Aline MacMahon) are caring for a group of crippled orphans.

What happens thereafter is a gallant defense of all the cinematic wall-mottoes which have grown dusty since the talkies. Jack Daugherty learns to like milking cows. He becomes the idol of the orphans, falls in love with pure, sweet Peggy. When the owners of the farm mortgage threaten to foreclose, he risks his freedom by going to the city to fight a touring heavyweight champion. He loses but earns the necessary funds. The Manhattan detective who recognizes him at the ringside is so touched by Jimmy Dolan's moral rehabilitation that, when the fight is over, he neglects to take him into custody.

Almost all the events that occur in the life of Jimmy Dolan could happen only in the movies. This is the strength of the picture. If Hollywood producers could practice their faith in the axioms which Jimmy Dolan's doings demonstrate, they would be far happier about their ledgers. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. gives an intelligent performance and manages to make his fisticuffs seem lively. I Loved You Wednesday (Fox) is the account of one exciting evening in the career of an indecisive danseuse named Vicki Meredith (Elissa Landi). At the beginning of the evening she is planning to elope with a dynamic but gentle civil engineer (Warner Baxter). Before they have time to arrange the details, she has a caller, Randall Williams (Victor Jory) who hopes that Vicki still remembers their romance which ended years before when he told her he was married. Through cocktails and a supper party in a speakeasy, where she meets Mrs. Randall Williams (Miriam Jordan), Vicki tries to make up her mind. She has practically decided to take a trip to Europe with Williams when he tells her that he plans to have her portrait painted so that this time, when their romance ends, he will have a souvenir. Thoroughly disgusted, Vicki stops packing her bags, skulks out of her apartment alone, hurries downstairs where her extremely civil en gineer is conveniently waiting. The struggle between Vicki Meredith and her lower self would have been more engrossing if there had been more doubt about the outcome. Daughter of Countess Zanordi-Landi, who said her mother was Austria-Hungary's Empress Elizabeth, Actress Landi says: "I don't care to talk about my ancestry because that is of the past." But her past (which includes English private tutors, a stage debut with an Oxford repertory company, authorship of three published novels) asserts itself in the Landi presence. Like Ruth Chatterton, Elissa Landi is violently patrician at all times and particularly so when she tries to be the creature of her instincts. This is a minor flaw in an otherwise pleasantly superficial parlor comedy, with modernistic interiors.

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