Cinema: The New Pictures Dec. 17, 1928

Caught in the Fog (talkie) is an uneasy and mildly sarcastic attempt to parody Crook Cinema which, in various disguises, has constituted nearly half of the recent output of Hollywood. Lots of crooks, including May McAvoy, a lady crook, sometimes dumb, sometimes stabbing into speech, come through Florida fog to a deserted houseboat on which the mother of a millionaire's son has left a pearl necklace worth $200,000 in cinema money. Boob detectives supply most of the comedy and Conrad Nagel's voice the best vocal sequences of a gentle melodrama which is parody only by afterthought.

Behind the German Lines. Diagrams are usually dull, including those which patriots and students kept during the War, marking on maps with little pins the lines of the combatants. It was hard to remember which pins stood for which side or what the irregular graph of a strategy meant in terms of life and death. In this picture, which UFA began to make in 1915, the lines of the diagrams move themselves, like animated cartoons. Neither a newsreel nor a story, it is a history of the War, seen from the German side, but impartially; most of the battle scenes were taken in battle and the captions are excerpts from official reports. Moving maps give unity to shifting offensives, tiny cavalry in the huge honeycomb of the Carpathians. German soldiers grinning and eating apples as they marched to an imaginary banquet in Paris, airplane battles, mine explosions, Von Hindenburg chewing his mustache, the Kaiser, with his dwarfish, withered arm held sideways, looking gingerly through a telescope, Russians annihilating a last nest of snipers in a taken town; you find to your surprise that diagrams can be more exciting than even such an excellent War-picture as The Big Parade.

The Barker. George Fitzmaurice directs intelligently and movingly the consequences of a circus-man's proud affection for his son and his fear that circusing will spoil the boy's chance of amounting to something. Highly admired as a stageplay two seasons ago, the story by Kenyon Nicholson is better than most screen-stories; and Milton Sills, the barker, is convincing even when he chokes his girl friend (Betty Compson) for contriving the seduction of his son by one of the carnival ladies (Dorothy Mackaill). Out of the sound device comes barker-lingo; Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (the barker's son) smiles just like his father; and the hitherto silent voice of Milton Sills has been surpassed, in its recording quality, only by that of Lionel Barrymore. Best shot: bed-time in the circus sleeping-car.