Movie Makers (Jan-May 1928)

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Photograph by United Artists. A NOCTURNE FROM THE CINEMA, SCENE IN "SORREL AND SON" PHOTOPLAYFARE Sorrell & Son THIS United Artists release, directed by Herbert Brenon, is the existing photoplay at its best. It offers the universal appeal of parental and filial devotion and interests the most simple playgoer; it is directed with an understanding and a delicacy that lift it to the high level of Shaw or O'Neill in spoken drama or of Galsworthy and Edith Wharton in current literature. It is what James Joyce terms "dramatic", in that it is produced by an artist conscious not Reviews for the Cintelligenzia only of himself but of the universe. And it lacks, entirely and completely, any descent to the vulgar or to boobcatching "hokum". It is a photoplay that a cultivated and complex man or woman of the modern world can see without irritation. Sorrell & Son gives us the story of an English world war veteran captain returning, a wounded invalid, to find a deserting wife and a jobless world. He makes a pal of his six year old son, finally gets employed as a porter, educates the son, who becomes a famous surgeon, rises to something like his: former pre-war economic and social status and then makes a gentleman's exit from a world of physical suffering, aided by an overdose of anesthetic given him, sorrowfully, by the son. He is shown to us as extraordinarily decent to his disreputable wife, patient with an impossible and amorous employer, restrained and wisely friendly with his son and (Continued on page 53) Amateur Movie Makers offers this new review department for the benefit of those photo-playgoers whose interest in the cinema coincides with a constitutional dislike for anything, on stage or screen, which painfully dots every "i" and crosses every "t" so that the "play faring man, even though a fool, will not err therein." These criticisms are designed to tell the intelligent movie fan of those photoplays which will appeal to the intelligent person. Wherever a photoplay also appeals to the great audience of Mr. and Mrs. Everybody, this department will cheerfully record the fact, because we believe that art can be produced which will have charm both for the simple and the complex. Here is no effort to state the social, educational, moral, ethical or religious values of the pictures reviewed. All of these things are laid aside. These reviews try to indicate photoplay entertainment for fairly critical persons of good taste. Neither are these notes written from the standpoint of cinematic in' terest, which is covered specifically in "Critical Focusing." We subscribe to the belief that the photoplay has only begun to be truly cinematic and that it is still too much under the domination of the spoken drama's technique. If any screen play does emphasize the true art of the cinema, that will be noted with whole-hearted approval. But, taking the photoplay as it is and as it develops from day to day, these reviews will give the answer to the discriminating person's frequent question, "What movie shall I see?" This critical approach, purely in behalf of the intelligent audience, we believe to be particularly suited to the readers of Amateur Movie Makers. Twenty -five