Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Jul 1929)

92 Continued from page 63 happen. To the younger generation, familiar plots are perhaps marvels of unexpectedness, and the faint smiles of familiar stars have the effect of an emotional simoon on new beholders — but let's to our muttons. Miriam, a streetwalker, is befriended by Geoffrey, who invites her to his rooms and introduces her to his boon companions, Tony and Hugli, also of the high-hat gentry. They are conventionally scandalized by Geoffrey's "wild" prank, but pretend to laugh it oft in the way of jolly, good fellows. Geoffrey's step is taken because the girl he loves has jilted him for a man of greater means. He takes Miriam to the church wedding, where dowagers sniff at her through those lorgnettes which are seen nowhere else these days but in Hollywood. With Miriam on his arm, he interrupts the bridal procession and confronts the bride with, "Let me introduce my friend. I'm sure you have, much in common — very common !" In spite of his execrable manners, Miriam learns to love Geoffrey, and when the bride wearies of her husband and tries to rekindle her romance with Geoffrey, Miriam takes a hand and saves him from weakening. Her reward is the love of this great, good man. There is satire in some of the sequences, chiefly where Miriam tells the story of her first, false step, but on the whole the picture is conventional. Edmund Lowe, restored to dress clothes as Geoffrey, has no opportunity to give one of his racy characterizations, and Miss Griffith is daintily lymphatic. The Discoverer of America. A picture photographed entirely in color is a novelty, when it is of feature length. "The Viking" is such a picture. So far so good. If color is all you want here is a plenitude of it. Very good it is, too, with less of the post-card quality than usual, and some of it is beautiful in the extreme. But the picture is seemingly without end. Just when you think it is reaching a welcome climax, every one takes a deep breath and resumes work. The result, despite the painstaking earnestness of the laborers, is empty and, I fear, just a bore, except to those who' are crazy about pageants. Are you crazy about pageants? I thought so. The story of "The Viking" is big and dramatic enough, goodness knows. It deals with the voyage of the Norseman Leif Ericson to America in advance of Christopher Columbus, according to history, and ends with his building a watchtower which still stands at Newport, Rhode Island. The Screen in ReViev? In making film material out of this epic of discovery, romance has been injected, with regulation screen villainy and all the other concomitants of a conventional movie. However, in spite of this, and good enough acting as well, the film never achieves realism, but remains in the category of a brilliantly dressed pageant. Now, if you like pageants, far be it from me to put a damper on your wholesome enthusiasm. Excellent performances are given by Donald Crisp, Pauline Starke, LeRoy Mason, Anders Randolf, and a great many others. Backstage Heartbreak. Tolerably interesting, because it is lively without being exciting — that's "Show Folks," another picture of backstage life. The trouble is that these yarns of vaudeville performers are all more or less the same, except for the names of the characters. In this instance we have the conceited young "hoofer" whose act is failing, though he doesn't realize it. He engages a girl partner, teaches her the dance routine and she makes their act a success. Jealousy causes the youth to discharge her, whereupon she gets the lead in a musical comedy and he finds a new partner. During the dress rehearsal of her show, she learns that he has made his Broadway debut that afternoon and flopped miserably. Loyally she goes to him, pretends that she has been fired and asks to resume work with him. Still in her musical-comedy costume, she rushes out on the stage with him and their act is a colossal success. Love, too, is in the offing. Mild menace is furnished by the producer whose show she deserts, but there is no suspense at all. Lina Basquette, a dancer rather than an actress, shows proficiency with her legs, but expresses no spontaneous emotion, let alone love of Eddie Quillan. He suggests her little brother more than her sweetheart. He is agile and rather pleasing, though in the talking sequence toward the end of the picture his voice jumps from one spot to the other, due to faulty recording. Robert Armstrong is the producer, and Carol Lombard, a very pretty blonde, is worth watching. Nonalcoholic. A gorgeous Grecian prologue bears but slight relation to the story set forth in "Manhattan Cocktail," but as the classical stuff is richly done it is worth seeing for itself. The same can scarcely be said of the remainder of the film, but it has drawing cards in the popular Richard Arlen, the promising Nancy Carroll, the adroit Paul Lukas, and the always amusing Lilyan Tashman. But, like many other important personalities, they adorn a story that really needn't have been told, so far as I am concerned. It purports to show how Broadway draws youth into its maw, and that many are called but few are chosen for success. Babs, Fred, and Bob, all graduates of a fresh-water college, are ambitious for careers on Broadway. All receive a raw deal from Renov, a fiendish theatrical producer whose machinations are not up to snuff in originality. In fact, his piece de resistance is a chestnut. Wishing to bring about the ruin of Fred and thereby assure himself a free rein with Babs, who is in his chorus, Renov sends the youth to the bank to get a check cashed. He makes his signature look like a forgery, Fred is invited into the manager's office, Renov is summoned and repudiates the check, whereupon Fred is clapped into prison. No, this isn't a dialogue picture. You feel that if silence had not imposed muteness on Mr. Arlen, as Fred, he would have spoken long and loud in spirited protest against such an old-fashioned ruse to get him out of the way. This story, by the way, was written by Ernest Vajda, hitherto highly regarded as a European playwright. I said hitherto. Miss Carroll sings two songs in the course of her short career as a chorine, and sings them prettily. A Dull Razor.' "Napoleon's Barber" is supposed by the cognoscenti to be significant, subtle and altogether rare. Didn't George Bernard Shaw praise the oneact play from which the three-reel picture was made ? For my part it is pretentious and tedious, with just one scene to justify it. This occurs when the Barber, who professes to hate the emperor and would willingly murder him, finds that the man he is shaving is none other than The Little Corporal himself. Thus the country barber for an instant holds the destiny of nations in his hand. Does he cut Napoleon's throat and thus justify his ravings? Not a bit of it. He cringes, fawns, and altogether acts the craven. While this is a moment of real drama, it evokes no thrill because it is obscured by a lot of talk. The picture, you see, is entirely in dialogue and the chatter is incessant. The acting of the chatterers is good enough, but the flavor of the whole is that of high-class amateur theatricals — probably because every one is deadly serious and seems intent on rewriting history. Otto Matiesen is Napoleon. His Continued on page 99