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JANUARY 1925
fusing to the veteran (MCturegOCT.
It is quite on the cards that he or she may waste a whole afternoon assiduously hating what appears to be the villain, only to discover in the last reel that he is the hero after all. On the other hand, villains are becoming gradually so polished and polite that it requires concentrated brainwork on the part of the audience to discern their real blackness of character. Incredible as it may seem they are even losing that old and time-honoured habit of hissing, always connected with them in the past.
Elderly charmers, too, are proving quite a menace to the popularity of the conventional boyish lover. And, truth to tell, they can be very charming. Lewis Stone imbues middle-aged roles with a romance greater than that of twenty-one, and Adolphe Menjou's sophisticated love-making does greater damage amongst feminine hearts than the old time methods of wooing ever accomplished.
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Aileen Pringle as " The Lady" of Elinor Glyn's " Three Weeks." Elinor invented the tiger skin tradition. For years no reel vamp was comp I e t e without
Top: The new style vamp exemplified by Mae Busch. Above : " The handsome open-faced young man who loved the heroine through thick and thin." (Walter Tennyson).
Dear Horace (Frank Mayo, in this instance) lays half a dozen of them out.
ler apron, while the villain stands over her and threatens her.
She doesn't vainly wring her wrinkled hands and wait for her youngest son to " make good out West " and come home in the nick of time. She knows perfectly well that her youngest son hasn't got it in him to make good anywhere, let alone " out West." The modern -movie mother is bobbed haired, young and charming, and can fight her own battles.
VY/ith this gradual change of characters, plots also have become different. They no longer have the same directness, and while in some cases they are infinitely better directed than the old-time stories, there are occasions when they rather over-reach themselves in a desire to express subtlety.
This, I .suppose, is because directors have altered. They are getting educated. In the old days a director's last qualification was education in any shape or form. But now they are going to the other extreme. They suffer, some of them, from such an overdose of " kultur " that they no longer put entertainment first in their ideas of what the public want.
Instead they substitute " education." Something " different " in the way qf films is wanted, so they take novels and plays that are obviously unfitted for reproduction in celluloid and attempt to do the impossible. The result is, in the words of the, press agent, a " screen classic " — in the words of the film fan " too slow for words."
The old-time pictures may have been crude, but there is this to be said for them. If they were melodrama, at least they pretended to nothing more. For all their crudity, they knew what they were driving at — and who can say that of some of the films of to-day? E. E. Barrett.