The educational screen (c1922-c1956])

March, ig^s The Theatrical Field 135 Wives for New," "Male and Female," "Forbidden Fruit," "The Affairs of Anatol," "Fool's Paradise," "Saturday night" and "Manslaughter," stand as a glittering record. And literally they do glitter, for he chooses his casts from among the brightest stars, his sets are the most gorgeous that money can . supply, his costumes are the latest word in luxurious fashion. Lavishness is his keynote, and he deals almost exclusively with the upper crust of society, with only an occasional dip into the 'lower strata by way of contrast. William DeMille lacks the hard brilHancy of his brother. Here is a softer, dreamier, more whimsical quality, that finds expression in such pictures as Barrie's "What Every Woman Know" and Tarkington's "Clarence" and Zona Gale's "Miss Lulu Bett." An associate once said of him, "He will never lower his standard of art to cater to popular taste." He does not entirely disregard the wishes of the public, but he never lets the box office interfere with his idea of a fine picture. "I suppose," commented another man, a writer, "that William DeMille has never made a picture that actually paid, with the exception of 'Midsummer Madness,' yet he is a great director." Maurice Tourneur stands out in my mind as one of the first who ever gave his audience credit for some intelligence, and allowed them to use their own imagination to enhance his effects. He is responsible for another of the screen's financial failures, that picture of moonbeams and shadows, "Prunella," and he has to his credit "The Little Princess," one of Mary Pickford's earlier successes; Conrad's "Victory," Stevenson's "Treasure Island," Cooper's "Last of the Mohicans," and, lately, "Lorna Doone." There is a directness about Tourneur's presentation of his subject that is wholly refreshing, and he has a way of gett-ng into the spirit of a story — he is Gounod, he is Cooper, not just an imitator. And when next you see one of his pictures, notice the beauty of his natural backgrounds. He has an unerring eye for it. Rex Ingram, inevitably, rode to fame with 'The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse." His more recent pictures, "Turn to the Right," "The Conquering Power," "The Prisoner of Zenda," "Trifiing Women," continue to show the qualities that the first revealed. First, and perhaps best of all, he has a respect for the story that is, to say the least, unusual among motion picture directors — no happy endings or trite situations when logic and the story demand otherwise; rather, the story for the story's sake. Added to this is a positive genius in casting a picture, and a keenness and faithfulness in small detail that lift his work high above the ordinary. The most frequent comment on his pictures is that he needs stronger stuff. The rather slight material of such stories as "The Prisoner of Zenda" and "Trifling Women" hardly merits the expenditure of the inspiration and energy he has lavished on them. Kipling's "The Light That Failed" and Victor Hugo's "Toilers of the Sea," both of which he may film, will offer sounder material to which we may look forward. Marshall Neilan is the raconteur of the screen. He is a brilliant director, a revolutionary, but his critics say he is erratic — apt to fly off at a tangent, or lose interest, so that his pictures as a whole are uneven. He has directed Mary Pickford in "Daddy Long Legs" and "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm"; his was the harrowing but intensely interesting tale of the newspaper reporter, "Go and Get It," that amusing satire, "The Lotus Eaters," in which John Barrymore discovered a modern Utopia, and that story of the eternal boy, "Penrod." And as proof of his revolt against convention, last year he produced "Bits of Life," a unique experiment in grouping four short subjects together. Another eccentric workman is Eric Von Stroheim, who has built his reputation as a great director on three pictures, the latest and most widely discussed of which was "Foolish Wives." "A genius, absolutely a genius," one person said of him, "but he needs to be curbed." The curb should come, perhaps, in the form of a better knowledge of the American taste in literature and pictures. An Austrian by birth, he is apparently a master at handling stories of European society and intrigue from the continental point of view. Without a doubt, gruesome details are his specialty; one wonders what he would make of some of Poe's tales. But he has yet to prove himself with a thoroughly American story, and he has that chance in "MacTeague," a San Francisco story by Frank Norris. Fred Niblo has to his credit two enormous