Cinema: The New Pictures Mar. 10, 1930

Lilies of the Field (First National). Pretty Corinne Griffith talks through her nose in her first sound-picture, playing in a manner saturated with melancholy the role of a young woman who, innocently compromised, has been divorced by her husband. She goes to work as a dancer in a roof garden show and after a while becomes the mistress of the resort's richest habitue. All daring stuff when Miss Griffith made Lilies of the Field as a silent picture, the little plot seems mild enough now, and its denouement, in which the girl marries her lover, can be foreseen by the end of the first reel. Corinne Griffith's charm is the only thing that gets it over, but it is obvious at times that she is uneasy too, especially at the moment when she has to drop her habitual air of dignified seductiveness to dance a tap routine in tights on top of a piano. Best shot: a barber telling a child the story about the three bears.

Many cinema-seers insist that Corinne Griffith is the most beautiful woman in pictures. Fifty famed artists have painted her portrait in oils, her ankles are shapely, and her hands have been modeled by numerous sculptors. Her husband, producer Walter Morosco, uses a bronze mould of her left hand as a paper weight on his desk. Last week in Los Angeles she pleaded guilty to a charge that she had tried to evade paying-part of the tax on her 1927 income ($198,000) and was fined $1,000. She says that after she has made one more picture she will retire. "Why should I go on until I am playing mother roles? ... I have plenty of money. . . . I want to improve my mind. . . . Most of the time you will find me bobbing around Europe. . . ." White Cargo (British). Several U. S. picture companies wanted to produce this, but Will Hays, supervisor of cinema morals, made clear that he would not sanction it. With W. Somerset Maugham's Rain it was salient on his black list. At last United Artists made Rain with Gloria Swanson, calling it Sadie Thompson; Hays permitted its release, but when producers pointed to this precedent as an argument for letting them bring out White Cargo, even suggesting that it could be disguised under its original title, Hell's Playground, he stood firm. White Cargo, in his opinion, was worse than Rain, worse than anything. Thus the way was open for the W. P. Film Co. of London, which bought the talking picture rights and released their product here, apparently without opposition. Their White Cargo is an uninspired photograph of the stage play acted by a fair stock company. Early in its proceedings you realize with a shock that it was this play that brought the useful word "acclimatized" into the current argot. There is also, as the young Englishman, new to Africa, proceeds toward moral degeneration, frequent mention of "damp rot." Its novelty is gone, but White Cargo is still an effective piece of theatre, ironic in spite of its loquacity. Best shot: the Englishman whose undoing has been traced being carried out to the ship to be sent home while his successor, doomed for a similar fate, enters, ambitious and punctilious, in crisp white ducks.