Despite the efforts of Producer Irving Thalberg, Director Frank Lloyd, three scenarists and $2,000,000 to give it balance, polish and direction, the picture lacks all three. There are intervals when the two hours which it lasts seem as interminable as Bligh's voyage in the open boat must have seemed to its occupants. The narrative, which skips the saga of Pitcairn's Island entirely for Tahiti love interest, still contains enough material for at least three films. These faults are indigenous to the historic material used. The picture has few others.

The Thirty-Nine Steps neatly converts its essential implausibility into an asset by stressing the difficulties which confront its hero when he tries to tell outsiders about the predicament he is in.

It is a perfect little masterpiece of high camp, not untouched by pity, terror and the desire to satirize boy-girl romances.

Alfred Hitchcock's direction, in which the story is told in sharp, abbreviated sequences gathering speed steadily toward their explosive climax, makes The Man Who Knew Too Much one of the neatest melodramas of the year.

Because of the authority with which it is acted and the skill with which Director John Stahl has built up individual episodes, the picture remains an efficient tearjerker, outspoken in its praise of motherlove.

The quick flow of comic incident through It Happened One Night reaches its fantastic conclusion...

Kong is an exaggeration ad absurdum, too vast to be plausible. This makes his actions wholly enjoyable.

The atmosphere which Director von Sternberg cleverly built up through the slow beginning of the picture and the brilliant photographic effects achieved by his camera man, Lee Garmes, have effect of giving this melodramatic cliché a reality which it could not possibly achieve in a medium less persuasive than the cinema.

Fredric March, ably assisted by Miriam Hopkins and Rose Hobart, is magnificent as Hyde, and he gives Jekyll a stilted Victorian elegance which, being a little false, makes Hyde's existence seem more credible.

Universal entrusted the direction of Frankenstein to James Whale. He did it in the Grand Guignol manner, with as many queer sounds, dark corners, false faces and cellar stairs as could possibly be inserted.

Unlike City Streets, this is not a Hugoesque fable of gangsters fighting among themselves, but a documentary drama of the bandit standing against society.

It is Mr. Jolson's first picture and as such of great import to the history of the current theatre. In no other way but pictures can his genius be preserved; and in this he is favored with the double preservative of picture and mechanical voice reproduction. The Vitaphone permits him to talk and sing his way through the sentimental mazes of the movie adaptation. He is a good actor; but he is a very great singer of popular songs. In cities where the Vitaphone can be installed and reproduce his voice this picture will eminently repay attendance.