Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1919)

Bv Julian Johnson T IKE Rachmaninort^s best-known prelude, John Barr>more's acting SYmK>li:es the loUy traseJv ot human Hte. A beginning in taint sounds thiit are \er> ghosts ot silence, a swirl to the clamor ot noisy young confidence, a crash into the discord ot maturity, a trembling into the uncertainties ot age ... a tadeout into chorded nothings. A SYMBOLot" all the ladies of embattled England, is this Sylvia Breamer: suave, yet ardent; poised, but passionate, with the tide in her veins as red as it is steady. Her image might well be the dusk figurehead ot any ship in the vast blue court ot the Mistress ot the Seas indomitable, inflexible, invulnerable, indetacigablc. r)OROTH Y DALTON is as much •^ an emblem ol the Middle West as a si>rority-pin (rom the U. o( 1. Looking into her pictured eyes I see grain elevators and moonhght on Lake Michigan; 1 hear French spoken with a State street twang; I think of a millii>naire's home in Lake Forest where they have a stack of wheats for breakfast. r^RlME in three shades pink, pinker, pinkest; that's Priscilla Dean. If you are ever robbed by Priscilla you must, surely, do one ot two things; love her yourself, or get some one else to do it. If you don't want to, you know my address. She's the 1919 model of all the bad babies who have to be made good by kissing. VIARIE PREXOST must be the old marble that Pygmalion loved and made warm ivory. Surely a sculptor wrought those round arms and perfect legs! Anyway, she's a Greek girl — a vision of the youth oi the world, when there w-eren't any motion picture censors and it wasn't considered naughty to be gorgeously healthy and bcautifu' all over. ■yHE PEOPLE who don't govern themselves because they're too busy governing everybody else have a statue that moves and talks and everything. Its name is Tom Moore. They took his eyes for lakes, his brogue for a language, his-smile for sunny skies, dumped them over a lump of land in the North Atlantic Ocean, and called it Ireland. T^O YOU think of a glacier on an infinitely-patient volcano when you look at Katherine McDonald .' She ought to play nothing — absolutely nothing — but those regal cool wives with Babylonian eyes who are always saying "Mine has been a marriage of convenience, George ... I understand . . . but you must never try to see me again ..." yOU'RE Russia, Alia; Russia with all her potentiality for art, power, anarchy. As a Chinese girl, an American mother, an Arabian adventuress, you are always that same symbol — brooding, fantastic, incomprehensible. In the tropics you suggest a background of snow on the steppes, yet in a Moscow droshky you seem a veritable Sirocco. You're Russia. J^ICHARD BARTHELMESS is a symbol ot Delight Evans' juvenc>cent ideal. On her fair figurative knec-s she begged me to write an "impression" of him, but I told her cheap competition had driven me out of the impression business. Some day she'll go to chant a Grand Crossing rhapsody about him. Please omit flowers. I'll tell the Coroner she died of joy. pEARL WHITE is the image of a creature she has never played — not one of these Chinee-chased serial queens, but a grand adventuress in diplomacy; a high-sexed schemess who, a year ago, would have set all the young Vons in the Wilhelmstrasse fighting wildly to protect her when some entirely old Hindcnburg turned her up to Pa Hohcnzollcrn as a spy. pHYLLlS HAVER, chicken-incarnate, is the standard sample of Misses'-siic America, Looking at Phyllis, one thinks of so many, many wonderful things ! However, it's a safe bet that Phyllis is thinling only that she's hungry, or of that dance laM night at The Ship, or of the new hat »hc's going to buy next week at Robinson's. pRANK KEENAN,more than any other interlocutor of the vertical platform, symboliies the Original Stalwart American. Why? Because said O. S. A., never one of these sweet juveniles, was there forty ways at fifty, a rugged oak sheltering some great cross-roads of life. Good man or bad man, Kecnan plays them all, and truly.