Cinema: The New Pictures Aug. 4, 1930

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Manslaughter (Paramount). Thomas Meighan and Leatrice Joy were in a silent picture made from this story. It was a good silent picture by the standards of its time, but its revival as a talkie seems unnecessary. Oldfashioned, stagey, sentimental, it deals heavily with one or two remote social problems and, more immediately, with a young woman who goes to jail for having caused the death of a policeman who was chasing her automobile on his motorcycle. Her conviction is obtained, with patent suffering, by a prosecutor who has fallen in love with her. The absurdities involved in these events are made more obvious by jerky and tasteless direction and not helped much by Claudette Colbert's efforts to take her part seriously. Worst shot: an epileptic having a seizure which, intended to be gruesome, will make most audiences laugh.