THE CRIMSON PAYGOER

Those who attend the University Theater this week to see Edward G. Robinson, cast as Mike, the Portagee, in "Tiger Shark," will hardly be too disappointed. Robinson is the great character actor of Hollywood at present, and the movie magnates are exploiting his good name to the full in a series of second-rate films such as "The Hatchet Man" and "Tiger Shark," But those who remember Robinson washing his hands of the messes in "Five Star Final" cannot but believe that a good actor is being wasted on bad material. Miss Zita Johann, the Quita of the picture who abandons her husband Mike for his first mate, might be an excellent actress if she would forget the Garbeled virgin of drama and act.

The plot's the thing, and the plot of "Tiger Shark" is just the theme song of one thousand and one cheap triangle melodramas set to the tuna fish industry. Hence the whole plot is out at the elbows, predictable, and slightly dull. The photography is good, affording many interesting shots of the proper way to catch fish, which are like all educational pictures, much too prolonged. It is enough to say that this movie is amusement but not art.

Perhaps because "Tiger Shark" has certain faults the University's other offering, "Blondie of the Follies," has certain incontrovertible merits. Its plot is the outworn story of the successful showgirl, the like of which Miss, Davies has played at least twice, probably oftener, but the lively lines save it. When one sees the Maid Marion in her usual role of a minx, it is clear why her pictures appear so often on the pages of Hearst's Cosmopolitan and in the Boston American. Of course an unfeeling and unsympathetic director made Miss Davies show maternal instinct over a dog, a part difficult to reconcile with the fact that she is a Colonel in the Unites States Army, but perhaps she is really maternal after all, and the public has been misled by Democratic propaganda. She shows other virtues, in failing miserably to make plausible an implausible scene of the crippled showgirl who gives it all up to go home, in giving an impersonation of Greta Garbo as the more intelligent critics see that Swedish mockingbird, and by spreading wide her amazing eyes at the proper moments.

The same amazingly unfeeling director who overworked the dramatic talents of Miss Davies hid his other talents to an appalling degree. Robert Montgomery, of happy "Private Lives" fame is choked with hardly a witty speech and Jimmy Durante displays himself so rarely that one wonders of his contract expired before the shots were all taken, Zazu Pitts, as Gertie and Sidney Toler, as Zazu's husband are likewise exasperatingly withheld from the public gaze. It does not, however, fellow that the follies of the director should prevent the tired student from seeing "Bloudie of the Follies" with that free ticket the night before an hour exam.