Pictures and the Picturegoer (Jan-Dec 1924)

18 Picture s and Pictxjre $> oer JANUARY 1924 Circle : Alice Lake with the thoroughbred Jones and Frank Mayo. Buck — Charles Jones, I beg his pardon — has temporarily deserted bronchos for 'Snowdrift, with Dorothy Manners playing opposite. And when Frank Mayo had finished being Elinor Glyn's hero in Six Days, the company thought he needed cooling off. So they put him into his first snow picture, Out of the Silent North, with Dagmar Godowsky; thus starting a precedent which looks like business. Ruth Roland, of course, is an old hand at the snow game. Her latest is a serial, The Timber Queen. But then Ruth has done so many things and scoured so many countries in her hair-breadth serial career that it would have been impossible for the snowfields to have been passed by without a "shot." But it's one thing to star in a film, and quite another to be a Snow Queen, the real genuine article. To make your mark in a Northern Film you have to be born to the purple, or rather — in this case — born to the snowshoe and the parkha. The rightful Snow Kings — and there are only two of them — arc much older men. It is curious that both of them have perpetually to suffer the fate of being dragged into eternal triangle dramas in Society drawing rooms. Nevertheless they escape to their beloved North whenever they can, to " The Great Open Spaces Where Men Arc Men," and where House Peters and Lewis Stone are the Men? That the snow is their rightful element is never in doubt for a moment. There they acquire instantaneously an ease of action, a breadth of acting, that is altogether foreign to them when they arc encased in evening dress and polished manners. House Peters, of course, is happy anywhere out of doors, be it lumber camp or snowdrift. Lewis Stone's, spiritual home is the Frozen North. There, and only there, is he thoroughly happy. Of the rightful Queens of the Snow there are also only two, with a close rival in Mabel Julienne Scott, who if she had been allowed to make more )naleintttes ikscd in " Uncharted Seas." films like Behold My Wife and No Woman Knows would to-day have been wielding the snowshoe in her own right. The two Queens are Jane Novak, a pale, blue-eyed peaches-and-cream heroine with hair like spun gold, a round, regular little face simply made for furs and kisses, and Alma Rubens, a mystery woman, with the lure of illimitable spaces in her dark eyes, unapproachable, silent as the Great Silences over which she reigns. Jane Novak's name has come to be synonymous with the heroine of every James Oliver Curwood story. Think of Isabel and Kazan, and it is always Jane that you will remember. And now Snozi'shoe Trails is coming along. Alma's snow excursions are few and far between, but you don't forget them. Who else but Alma could have played the mysterious stranger in The Valley of Silent Men with that queer mixture of the boy and the woman that characterises all her work? No one could forget that first entrance with the dog-team across the snow, the challenge and the dignity of her, the queer. smouldering eyes, whose fire would melt the snow, you'd say, wherever she let them rest. Long live the Queen! Snow films .... We've always loved them .... E. R. T. Right, reading dozvtiwards : The great zvhite silence in " Where the North Begins." Artificial snoiv stuff in " Beyond the Rocks" (it looks it !) ; and a scene from "Southward ivith the Quest."