The New Pictures

The Man Who Played God (Warner). The crucial moment in this picture arrives when George Arliss, standing on the balcony of his Manhattan apartment, peers down into Central Park with spy glasses applied to his melancholy eyes which, in private life, are aided only by a monocle. Arliss is a celebrated pianist, indignant because deafness has made impractical the pursuit of his art. While cursing the deity and contemplating suicide, he has learned to read lips so adroitly that he can do it with field glasses. Looking into Central Park, he spies out his fiancee who is engaged in amorous colloquy. She is saying that she feels bound, out of sympathy, to marry Arliss.

Arliss, whose long-range eavesdroppings have previously prompted him to perform other sly philanthropies, releases her. When the picture ends he is strumming on an organ and apparently contemplating matrimony with a sympathetic widow (Violet Heming).

Sober, pious, less dramatic than it should have been, The Man Who Played God has the distinction of that crafty dignity which George Arliss injects into all his impersonations. His thin smile, his high nose, his punctilious diction relieve the antiquated arguments of the story (by Gouverneur Morris) which will be joyfully hailed by those who regard the cinema as an agent for good.

At 63, George Arliss is the dean of Hollywood's leading men, as Marie Dressier is the Mother Superior of its heroines. His frugality; his apelike way of walking, with his shoulders stooped and his hands hanging about his knees, make him more of an enigma to Hollywood than Hollywood is to him. He defends it against its detractors, calls it busy, sane. His valet. Jenner, who has been with him for 25 years, brings him tea at 3:30 every day, sees that he quits work promptly at 4:30, says he has never seen George Arliss break a monocle. Worn first as an affectation, the Arliss eyeglass, which has ribbed a groove into his right cheek, has long since been more than an optical necessity, more than a symbol of a political and social heritage, like the monocle of Sir Austen Chamberlain (TIME, Feb. 15). It is a trademark, a talisman, the badge of an intelligence which views humanity with graceful hauteur and interprets it with charm. A vegetarian, because it hurts his conscience to eat anything he might have patted, Cinemactor Arliss wears high shoes, likes slang, has never driven an automobile, hopes some day to be knighted.

Business & Pleasure (Fox). Though he is head of a large company and hard beset by industrial difficulties, the Earl Tinker who is the hero of this picture must not be confused with the Edward Tinker who is president of Fox Film Corp. It would be libelous to suggest that Edward Tinker has mobile lips, like a mule's, a wiggling weather-beaten nose, and so little knowledge of how to behave that he would annoy his fellow passengers on a transatlantic liner by hooting low ballads in the ship's bar and chuckling at their mal de mer. It would be absurd to think that Edward R. Tinker would endanger the prestige of the Chase National Bank by wearing the false whiskers of a Damascus fortune teller, calling his wife Momma or cracking such a joke as "it won't be long now." Edward R. Tinker would not allow a treacherous female adventurer to pat his shoulder. Nor would he (even to strengthen the financial structure of Fox Film Corp.) impersonate a radio voice to astonish a sandpile millionaire in Asia Minor as a preliminary to smoking imitation hashish through a gasoline pipe.

It might be supposed that such antics would only be accomplished, without loss of face, by a low grade buffoon with small respect for his calling. Such is not the case. They are performed here by Will Rogers and become a typical Rogers product, amiable, offhand, bourgeois, amusing.

Wayward (Paramount). The casual cinemaddict will be vaguely bothered by trying to remember whether he has either read the story or seen the picture before. Actually he has done both. There has been previous elaboration, sometimes dramatic, sometimes melodramatic, on the theme of the scion of two ancient, rich and grotesquely conservative lines (Richard Arlen) who weds a chorine, Daisy (Nancy Carroll), and takes her back to the ancestral mansion. Smooth sequence, good photography, competent acting, have not resuscitated this frail, old plot. The dowager mother (Pauline Frederick), psychopath! cally jealous of her son's affections, willfully twists Daisy's innocent relationship with the family black sheep (John Litel) into a scandal. One night Daisy, lonely and desperate, gets drunk and inadvertently runs away with Litel. Though she immediately returns, the mother triumphantly drives her from the house, her husband believes her guilty. Later when Daisy comes surreptitiously to abduct her child, matters are set aright.

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