Cinema: The New Pictures: Aug. 24, 1931

(2 of 3)

Silence (Paramount) is an oldfashioned melodrama, packed with episodes of a kind which are usually called ''good theatre" to indicate that they have small resemblance to life. A crook (Clive Brook) on the point of being executed for murder, confesses to a priest. His confession, which constitutes the main portion of the picture, shows that, though innocent, he is maintaining a pretense of guilt to shield his daughter (Peggy Shannon). Good shot: a kitten playing with the ball of wool under which the crook has cached a roll of stolen money.

Men Are Like That (Columbia) is a distressing but feeble commentary on situations of social discord in an outlying Army post. Jilted by a dashing lieutenant (John Wrayne), the girl (Laura La Plante) marries his friend, who is a colonel. Later, to preserve the morals of her young sister, she compromises the lieutenant so seriously that he nearly loses his commission. Based on Augustus Thomas' play Arizona, which was produced in 1899, Men Are Like That seems a needless survival of an insignificant intrigue. A typically trite shot is the one with which the picture starts: an Army-Navy football game which the hero wins by kicking a field goal.

Sporting Blood (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) has to do with a racehorse named Tommy Boy. Bred on a Kentucky farm, he is sold successively to a pot-bellied stable owner, a spendthrift with a petulant wife, a gambler who dopes him to win a race. When the gambler is murdered after a misunderstanding with his confreres, his mistress inherits the horse, winters him on the farm where he was bred, enters him in the Kentucky Derby. Gamblers try to fix this race also; but Tommy Boy's owner has a stable boy cut a notch in the reins so that, when the jockey tries to hold him back, Tommy Boy breaks the reins, wins the race. Most race-track pictures sentimentalize both horses and humans even more than this one, which is, on the whole, exciting, interesting, occasionally authentic. Subsidiary stories about humans surround the chronicle of Tommy Boy. His last owner, the gambler's mistress, is deeply attached both to Tommy Boy and to a young gambler who, regenerate in the last reel, informs her stable-hands of the plot which he has helped to formulate. Shots of Elmendorf, Joseph E. Widener's farm near Lexington, Ky.; the 1931 Derby at Churchill Downs; of Vice President Curtis (a onetime jockey) marching down the clubhouse steps; and the sounds of a radio announcer mingling the names of real Derby horses (Spanish Play, Sweep All) with fictitious ones (Tommy Boy, Bar Sinister), help make the atmosphere of Sporting Blood less spurious than is customary. So does the performance of Clark Gable, who impersonates the young gambler with that air of reckless, good-humored depravity which has made him an overnight favorite among female cinemaddicts.