Cinema: The New Pictures Feb. 27, 1928

Four Sons. New York newspapers cluttered their columns last week, puffing up Margaret Mann, white-haired, 60, for years an extra, but now the featured player of Four Sons, the latest candified cinemotherlove. At the expansive opening in the Gaiety Theatre, Morris Gest sniffled.

Four Sons parades the emotions of Bavarian Mother Bernle who sees three sons goose step to war and death. The fourth and youngest had sailed before the War to the U. S., but he too eventually holds a bayonet. Evil appears in the person of a Prussian, monocled and stooped, mannered and sneering. But Director John Ford sees to it that the boy is safely returned to New York and mother.

Notables nicely cast were Archduke Leopold of Austria as the Prussian; Ferdinand Schumann-Heink, son of Singer Schumann-Heink, as a staff surgeon, and Miss Mann, conspicuous by the paucity of her history. Born in Aberdeen, Scotland, one of ten, she abandoned schooling for work at nine, sailed to South Africa, later married, and settled in Washington, D. C. She first put on costume as a pageant player, dressing as Martha Washington. At fifty she had her initial extra job; ten years later she was singled out as the ideal lead for Four Sons where the lined maternity of her face is pleasant but almost smothered in plot glucose.

Sporting Goods. The tradition that youthful salesmanship ranks in romance with search for the Holy Grail forms the basis for this fossilated farce. Richard Dix, as a brawny, broken-nosed, commercial traveler, twines love and business, achieving girl and commission. It gags and gurgles about the young salesman and his sweetie who admires him for being both opulent and deceitful. Ethics are somewhat mixed, the principals in an excellent poker sequence shifting cards until Dix acquires four of a kind, raking in thereby $4,000. Director Malcolm St. Clair, smart maker of the recent Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, was more interested in scenery than story.

Thanks for the Buggy Ride. This is one more somewhat rickety vehicle for the comic daintiness of Cinemactress Laura La Plante. It is an antiquated wagon, moving along upon wheels of device so often employed that they squeak loudly: thus, at a picnic, pigs gobble the sandwiches; when the picnickers, a young songwriter and a dancing instructress, seek nearby shelter they are embarrassingly mistaken for a married couple, which, later on, they become. Thanks for the Buggy Ride seems to be unconscious of its triteness. It has a careless, youthful, bumptious gaiety, which gives it the quality of a nutting bee, or a hayride in a Ford truck organized for the amusement of juvenile sophisticates.