Cinema: The New Pictures Aug. 25, 1930

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Eyes of the World (United Artists). Transcription of a novel by Harold Bell Wright, this cinema is a compound of a half-dozen violently familiar melodramas. Among the complications moves an unhappy woman who always wears a black veil and who in the end turns out to be the long-lost mother of one of the characters. There is also an unscrupulous society woman, her evil brother, and a country girl whom an artist from the East finds bathing at dawn in a mountain pool. Blond Una Merkel takes the part of this young girl. That her good looks and slow, intense voice will make her important before long is the only interesting suggestion conveyed by the whole silly business. Typical Wright phraseology: "vipers" (for villains), "little minx" (for heroine), "ablution" (for bath).

Queen High (Paramount). Although this was a successful Broadway musical show four years ago even such talented entertainers as Charles Ruggles and Frank Morgan can hardly make a fair program picture out of it in its present form. The trouble is that the plot has been padded with pointless routine fooling and the old songs replaced with poorer though newer ones, badly sung. It still, however, contains that fine scene in which two partners in a tottering garter business draw a poker hand to decide which shall serve as the other's butler for a year.

Recaptured Love (Warner). Dedicated to the proposition that there is no fool like an old fool, this shows how a clever wife handles an aging husband's infatuation with a younger woman. No new twist is given the theatrical stencil except the inept title which, proclaiming the denouement, effectively checkmates suspense. On the stage it was Misdeal, a play by Basil Woon. Belle Bennett and John Halliday are in it. Best sequence: Miss Bennett teasing the husband who wants to come home.