Cinema: The New Pictures: Feb. 23, 1931

Dracula (Universal). Director Tod Browning, who had charge of the best Lon Chaney pictures, has a talent for creating macabre atmosphere by the use of "interiors." He is a director who never, if he can help it, photographs a scene out of doors and then only at night or in a fog. Bram Stoker's famous novel about a vampire who survives hundreds of years after his death by drinking human blood and who is killed at last by a professor who drives a stake through his heart as he lies in his coffin provides ideal material for Browning. He has done a good job with it, especially with the settings in a madhouse and in cellars. Bela Lugosi, who made a success in Dracula on the Manhattan stage, takes the leading role. As the scenes flash in twilight, accompanied by such noises as wolves howling, bats screeching, and women screaming, Lugosi, in the form of a huge bat, flits in and out of the windows of Carfax Abbey, close to which most of the action takes place. Dracula is an exciting melodrama, not as good as it ought to be but a cut above the ordinary trapdoor-and-winding-sheet type of mystery film. Silliest sound: Helen Chandler's feeble soprano chirrup uttered repeatedly as an indication of superhuman fear.

Bright Lights (First National). Made a year ago, Bright Lights was put on the shelf, presumably because too many other pictures just like it were being released. Unfortunately, seasoning has only helped to shelve it permanently. Its backstage plot, its industriously plugged songs, its imperfect sound-recording, its imperfect technicolor, already are relics of a dead past in picture making. Dorothy Mackaill is good looking and Frank Fay fairly funny. The plot—a show girl who is about to marry a millionaire when her past, in the person of Noah Beery, turns up and threatens her happiness—is good enough to suggest that Bright Lights would have held its own with the competition of last year. Most tedious shot: Frank McHugh as a drunken reporter.

Stolen Heaven (Paramount). Nancy Carroll wears pretty clothes and struggles with stupid dialog, with weak direction by George Abbott, and with a story by Dana Burnet that might have been impressive, if thoroughly and patiently dealt with, but that turns out badly. A young man (Phillips Holmes) who has held up a radio factory meets a discouraged girl in a city street late at night. She hides him in her room and, liking each other, they make a bargain. They decide to go to Florida to spend the $20,000 he has stolen; when it is gone, they will commit suicide. In Palm Beach, Holmes still wants to kill himself but the girl wants to live. When police come to arrest the robber she has obtained some more money from another admirer and thought of a way out of their difficulties. The picture is bearable because of its handsome settings and because it is well acted. Best sequence:

Nancy Carroll going to the casino for some fun on what she believes is her last night on earth.

Nancy Carroll began her dramatic career hanging from a chandalier at the