Cinema: The New Pictures: Oct. 2, 1933

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Wild Boys of the Road (Warner). Eager to maintain their boast that they set the style for other Hollywood companies, Warner Brothers have recently become interested in the problems of adolescent delinquents. In The Mayor of Hell, James Cagney and a juvenile cast headed by Frankie Darro solved the matter of reform schools. Wild Boys of the Road is derived from those parts of a Russian picture called The Road to Life which were not used in The Mayor of Hell. Nonetheless, it is by no means an uninteresting stencil. Darro, aided this time by Edwin Phillips and a young actress named Dorothy Coonan, makes it a compelling, sometimes even an honest, portrait of a brutal and bitter way of life. Eddie Smith and his friend Tommy, unable to help their unemployed parents at home, set off to ride freight trains. They pick up with a girl named Sally who takes them to visit her gay aunt in Cleveland. There they get a chocolate cake, leave by the fire escape when the police come through the door. Sally has an unhappy encounter with a brakeman, Tommy loses a leg under a freight train, Eddie is on his way to becoming a sullen young desperado before the picture pro vides an improbable regeneration including jobs for all three, the promise of a speedy return home. Good shot: a wise, contemptuous old hobo advising Eddie and a hundred or so of his confreres to beat down a handful of railroad detectives who have frightened them off a train. The Solitaire Man (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Actor Herbert Marshall per formed so ably as a gentleman crook in Paramount's Trouble in Paradise that M-G-M at once saw the necessity for getting him for another such part. In this picture he is one of a band of diamond thieves, niching politely in the capitals of Europe. When one of his accomplices commits too bold a burglary, Marshall undertakes to restore the stolen necklace. In doing so, he gets himself suspected of committing murder. The climax of the picture arrives when he is on board a Paris-to-London plane, in company with his impetuous accomplice (Ralph Forbes), a pretty female thief (Elizabeth Allan), a lugubrious individual who claims to be a Scotland Yard inspector (Lionel Atwill), and a noisy U. S. tourist (Mary Boland). By the time the plane lands at Croydon, Marshall has found means to incriminate the alleged Scotland Yard inspector. He and Miss Allan plan to settle down in Devonshire and reform. The Solitaire Man is a slight, rapid and amusing melo drama, in which even the killings are per formed politely.

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