The current bill at the University offers two features of widely divergent character, yet possessed of a connecting bond in the refined person of Mary Astor. The appearance of the same star in both pictures of a double feature programme is scarcely and asset, but it is a tribute to this young woman's unobtrusiveness that it is only towards the end of the last picture that the seat becomes suddenly extremely uncomfortable.

In "The Lash", Richard "Barthelmess vehicle, and attempt is made to re-create the conditions that existed in California in 1846 when that Mexican territory was annexed to the United States. The plot is concerned with the efforts of an old feudal family to withstand the introduction of Americans and their ways into their set and radically different mode of life. Barthelmess, as the young Mexican of noble birth, turns outlaw as the result of a beating he receives at the hands of a government official, and roams the countryside trying to preserve his ancestral ranch, and indigenous qualities of his people.

Moving across a background of great scenic attractiveness, and indulging in an occasional fiesta the hero manages to keep active, while Mary Astor and Marian Nixon exert themselves to live up to the respective names of Rosita and Dolores. For the sake of these two there is much hard riding, but in the end el Puma realized that might does make right, and bows his head to the inevitable.

In "Behind Office Doors" the theme is hardly less romantic than that of "The Lash", but instead of having the vast plains as a locale, the action occurs in a modern business office.

Mary Astor, as the secretary of Robert Ames, is the cause of that young man's remarkable rise in the world of affairs. It is her astuteness and enterprise that opens the portals of success for her employer, and it is almost not until it is too last that he perceives that she has made herself indispensable, and has the decency to marry the deserving young woman.

"Behind Office Doors" should have been a shorter picture by several hundred feet, for at times it drags intolerably. And one is very apt to leave the theatre with the unkind feeling that if one doesn't see Miss Astor until a year from next Michelmas one is likely to survive.