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Ted Lewis was one of jazz's first jazzbos. He was playing the clarinet crazily in Earl Fuller's band in Rector's restaurant, Manhattan, when he began to make money. Until then his antics had always got him into trouble. His father made a good living running the ladies bargain store in Circleville, Ohio. Young Lewis went over to Chillicothe in the street car every night to play in the high school band. Of Hebrew descent, he joined the Episcopal church to sing in the choir next to a girl he liked. He was discharged from Henry Goldsmith's music store in Columbus because whenever he tried out a clarinet for a customer people thought he had gone crazy. He kept running away from store jobs to work in bands but was usually sent home because he could not play in time. After he left Fuller's band he made a hit. Lewis enlarged his stage until it included the whole continent. Although he preceded in popularity such current figures as Paul Whiteman and Meyer Davis he has consistently refused to take his profession solemnly. Asked to give a jazz concert in Carnegie Hall, Manhattan, he replied: ''Boloney! Do you want to make me out a jackass?" His orchestra is a well-schooled unit of lively individuals. He was one of the first jazz-producers to practice leaving the orchestral dais and wandering among the dancers while playing. He has played in many a musical comedy, in bigtime vaudeville. The Prince of Wales is his friend. He spends most of his time west of the Alleghenies, earns from $4,000 to $8,000 per week.
Around the World via Graf Zeppelin (Hearst). Mountains, cities, woods, rivers, steppes, cheering crowds. Chicago, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans have been photographed from the air hundreds of times. As seen from a window of the Graf Zeppelin they are not any more exciting than they have been in the past. Only a sense of the topical connection of these particular scenes and the unlikelihood that a camera could go around the world in a dirigible without finding anything interesting keeps you watching till the end. Apparently the unlikely has happened. There is a synchronized sound accompaniment, but that was put in at the studio. Best shot: one of the crew crawling out along the hull 3,000 ft. above the Atlantic.
Condemned (Goldwyn). There is hardly a scene in this that is not well photographed and Ronald Coleman and Ann Harding act as well as you would expect. Unfortunately, the charm that the director has taken such pains to put into Condemned is wasted because it is inappropriate. Proper picturization of the grim penal colony on Devil's Island* calls for another quality than charm. This bleak little story about a criminal who fell in love with the abused wife of the prison warden could have been made credible only by thoughtful, undecorative realism. Best shot: Louis Wolheim, the toughest man on Devil's Island, exposing a ring of tattoo-marks around his neck, with the legend: "Cut on the dotted line."