The Film Daily (1918)

Sunday, July 21, 1918. isit^A DAIL.V 31 Sure-Fire Comedy With Great Cast and Funny Complications Wallace Reid in "LESS THAN KIN" Paramount DIRECTOR Donald Crisp AUTHOR Alice Duer Miller SCENARIO BY Marion Fairfax CAMERAMAN Henry Kotani ART DIRECTOR Wilfred Buckland AS A WHOLE Pleasing cast, delightful comedy and amusing complications make this a surefire winner anywhere. STORY Amusing complications evolving around hero who impersonates dead man to dodge his own past. DIRECTION Provided good atmosphere and made it snappy all the way. PHOTOGRAPHY Artistic. Doubles well timed and dissolves excellent. LIGHTINGS Generally very fine CAMERA WORK Very good STAR Great SUPPORT Generally excellent EXTERIORS Very good but sub=station set could have been more convincing. INTERIORS Very good except bank interior looking: out on street which registered very "setty". DETAIL Manv good touches; some sure=fire titles CHARACTER OF STORY Comedy=drama for any audience; is sure=fire. LENGTH OF PRODUCTION About 4,500 feet THEY'VE given Wally a story that was evidently madetoorder for him in this and he sure puts it over with a bang. We had some great titles to help this alone and the many unexpected twists make it travel on high all the way. Wally is a young American in Honduras who is wanted for murder in New York, he having too strenuously broken up a wife-beating battle with the result that the husband was killed. The wife loved her husband even if he was ruff and testified against Wally with the result that he was sentenced for life, but the wprden h'd carelessly left the "cage" open so his good looking jail-bird could beat it. in Honduras he meets a man who is his exact double, also a New Yorker, and when this feller conveniently oies and leaves his identification papers, Wally, who longs for the bright lights, decides to go hack to New York and assume the dead man's place and station. The dead man's father, not having seen his son for twelve years, swallows Wally's story and after he meets an adopted cousin, Anna Little, he is just beginning to be glad he came when things start to happen. The dead man had been an absconder and had left many debts behind him which responsibility Wally has to shoulder but the final blow comes when the dead man's wife and kids, having seen Wally's picture in the papers, hunt him up and call him "Paw." Wally insists that he has never seen the woman before but when she produces the marriage license made out in the name of the dead man Wally is impersonating, he finds himself in a jam. This makes him decide to take a chance on his own past and he tells Anna that he is not the dead man but his double, Lewis Yickers. At this juncture a former cell-mate of Wally's turns up and identifies him as the escaped murderer. Wally finds himself between fires — if he is Vickers, the chair awaits him and if he is Lee, he has an awful looking wife and two ruff-neck kids on his hands. Wally is locked in a room while his rival for Anna, Raymond Hattan, stays on guard outside the door waiting for the sheriff to arrive. Wally escapes, and appropriating a car. beats it for the Canadian border. After he has gone a ways, he finds that Anna is in the tonneau, having hidden under some robes and they beat it to a convenient church and get married just as the sheriff and banker arrive. The banker has learned that the wife of the man Wally had murdered had retracted her evidence so Wally is free and we have the clutch. We had some very good detail bits throughout the offering but the sub-station set would have fooled anybody if they had dirtied it up a bit and smeared some posters over it. As it is. it's too clean and gets over as a "set". A little more attention to detail here would have gotten this by as a sure-enuf shot of a New York street corner. Of course, this was made in Los Angeles, where everything (pertaining to transportation) is on the level. The very capable cast included Jim Cruze, Gustav Seffertitz. Noah Beerv. James Neil. Charles Ogle. Jane Wolff. Guv Oliver. Calvert Carter and J. Herbert. Mae Murray P: in Fix reels' — produced b^l ERT LEONARD, MPDA Watch for announcement of future affiliation August 1st.