Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1919)

Photoplay Magazine n Forman to speak kindly lo her, and ihe rest oJ ihc (.a>t — >ut.h big birds as Theodore Roberts and Raymond Hatton in tiller parts — is as perfect as the little out-ol-lhc-way bolls in a RollsRoyce. Ever>' title-writer in America should read these inserts and leaders: one is tempted to say that they are the best titles since the sonorous legends of "The Birth of a Nation." We are waving a flag instead of making apologies when they produce photoplays like this. THE RED LA.NTERX— Metro A year of Chinese plays reaches its climax in this huge cacophonous symphony of colorless lacquers and soundless gongs and gray shadows of yellow men. The malerial upon which Nazimova of all races builds her sadron tragedy is a novel by Edith \Vherr>-, descriptive of life in the Pekin foreign legation about the time of the Bo.xer horror, nearly twenty years ago. Mme. N'azimova plays two parts; Mahlee, an Eura^ian, and Blanche Sackville, in reality the unsuspecting half-sister of Mahlee. Notwithstanding an intensely dramatic role by the -:ar, it is as a spectacle more than as a play that this story •ncems us. The Eurasian is a solitary; he is distant kin to iwo races and is not admitted to close relationship by either. So with Mahlee. raised in a mission, and not realizing until she aspires to the hand of the household s son that she is as much a thing apart from fair-skinned folk as a mulatto in Alabama. It is then that she turns to her Eurasian pursuer, the villainous Sam Wang, who has studied medicine in America and has returned to be an insidious force for both good and evil among the people to whom he, too, is just a cousin. The drama of destiny works as swiftly after her surrender to Sam Wang — spiritually, at least — as it did slowly before. Wang, the inside agent of the Bo.xers in Pekin, needs a personality about whom he can weave false magic; a superwoman to sway the credulous yellow rabble in an incense of fakcry. Mahlee, grasping her one hour of infernal glorj-, becomes that woman. The end, of course, is defeat and death, but by the hokuspokus invented long ago to appease the populace when they clamored against the death of a heroine, the star survives pleasantly and innocuously in her other personality, Blanche Sack\-iUe. I doubt if any such gorgeous Celestial pageant as this Feast of Lanterns has ever been seen outside China itself. And I have seen some Mongolian spectacles — believe me! — in California. It is this barbaric splendor of both interior and e.xterior, this atmosphere of little lilies and heavy incense, this silent din of bronze gongs and falsetto voices, which most engages the beholder; after, possibly, the performance of N'azimova herself. I feel sure that the star's bizarre costumes will enchant ever>' woman in the land. They may or may not be Chinese — for all I know — but they are wonderful; so wonderful that they might in themselves influence the fashions as occasionally the toggery of great stage plays has done. Nazimovas performance is on a high level of excellence without any startling distinctions, unless her sharp and remarkable differentiation between Mahlee and Blanche Sackville is such a distinction. That shrewd actor. Edward J. Connelly, plays perfectly the very small part of General Jung-Lu. and Noah Beer> is a wicked Sam Wang who suggests only the European part of his Eurasian ancestry-. The book is a flexible, workable one, rather than an essay which rises at any place to great power or suspense. The same may be said of Mr. Capellani's direction. The only actual detriment the piece has is a set of commonplace, utterly undramatic subtitles. How Maxwell Karper permitted such a dull s«l of words to go out with his veritable optic music is hard to understand, for these sayings are formula stuff to the last degree, no more reminiscent of Celestial surrounding than a tea-cup made in Dresden. UPSTAIRS AND DOWN— Sdznick Do you remember the Hattons' play of scandalous Long Island society"' Here it is in the movies — smart, snappy, suave, ami lighted by a sun which shines just alxjut as well on Long Island as in California. Olive Thomas plays the baby vampire, it seems to us even more effectively than Juliette Day did at the Cort theatre, in New York, but perhaps it is because she is starred, while Miss Day performed without benefit of close-up. .At any rate, not even Miss Thomas' first essays with Triangle found her more piquant and beautiful. Robert Ellis plays Capt. Terence OKeefc, and though he Douglas Fairbanks in "Knickerbocker Buckaroo," hia latest and incidentally his last Artcraft. I his Scandinavian pliotuplay, "The Girl f i una liic .Marsh Croft," visualizes Selma LagerlbCa novel. Charles Ksy, in "Greased I.i){htnin|(," is an outomobilious young blacksmith who linkers Fords and ihe chariot of love.