This is a picture that has slipped by many people unseen because its title suggests gangland melodrama. In reality, it is one of the most sensitively conceived and perfectly directed films of the year.

It is a story of a French soldier who has killed his German in the trenches and who goes to Germany after the war to find the dead boy's parents. He doesn't know why he wants to see them; but he feels that somehow his crime must be expiated. The real argument of the play begins as the young Frenchman (Mr. Phillips Holmes) finds himself received into the family as the dead man's friend. He cannot tell them the truth. He stays on, and by degrees becomes as a new son to them. He becomes indeed the new living center of a household that had lost hope, a household where shades were always drawn and footsteps passed too slowly in the hall.

Mr. Phillips Holmes displays once more that mixture of sensitiveness and craveness which were so appropriate to his part in "An American Tragedy." But in "The Man I Killed"his weak and baffled face is the worse element in an otherwise good picture.

The two people who make this film the sincere thing that it is are Mr. Lionel Barrymore and Miss Louise Carter. They play the old German couple who have lost their son. Nothing could be better than Mr. Barrymore as the shaky, sweet-natured old father, and Miss Carter as the weary and bewildered little wife is genuinely pathetic and touching. Whether she stands at her son's grave, a tiny figure in black, while the autumn leaves blow by, or whether she smiles uncertainly and hopefully at her new son, she achieves an authentic effect of pathos. Throughout the picture, the emotions are most neatly played upon without loss of good taste. You will remember the sweetness and genuineness of this old German couple.