Exhibitors Herald (1926)

54 EXHIBITORS HERALD April 10, 1926 stituting a very useful and practical item of lobby display. Additional sheets of this general style convey additional information about the Universal policy, executive personnel, directors, stars and players. In forty-five of these sheets, compactly confined in a heavy book cover done in pressed Japanese tissue, Mr. Brown has contrived one of the most convenient and serviceable announcement devices ever manufactured. It is not my province to tell you about the pictures concerned in the announcement. This information will come to you in due time. But I cannot pass the policy announcement page without quoting the following: “Universal has done it again. We have set our line-up for the season of 1926-27. It will be called Universal’s Greater Movie List. A truly great name for a deservingly great group of pictures. “While others are making vague promises of pictures to come, advertising a picture now and then, we have worked like beavers — silently and ind.ustriously — every department of its wonderful Universal organization straining every talent and ability, to give you what we honestly believe to be the greatest, best balanced group of pictures with the finest array of box-office stars and casts and money-making exploitation values ever offered by any one company. “The Greater Movie List will be sold on Universal’s Golden Rule Contract: the squarest, whitest and straightest business agreement put on paper.” * * * WHILE the business of making pictures the business o them seems to get nowhere, producing organizations handle the problem variously, but there is no general advancement. I have a deeply rooted suspicion that bad captions cost the industry more money than any other production fault. Certainly they destroy more pictures than bad direction or acting. There are a few good caption writers. There are not enough of them to write all the captions for all the pictures. The idea that some sort of school might be founded to train caption writers isn’t especially good, but it’s worth trying. The better way is to hold elimination contests for plumbers, locomotive engineers or Woolworth clerks to cull out individuals who possess an ear for words and a sense of fitness. It is a simple matter to teach them necessary rules of grammar, or to hire copy readers to punctuate their stuff. An ear for words is the essential mainly comedy, and he’s one of the most effectively pathetic figures the screen has reflected in many moons. There is no reason why he should go back to comedy unless he prefers it. Louise Brooks is the third person in the cast. This odd young person, who worked with Ford Sterling in that screaming interlude of “The American Venus,” is a positive quantity. She may become a sensational success or a sensational flop, but she is not the kind of player who simply goes along. She’s a manicure girl in this one, later a night club dancer, and she’s unfailingly colorful. I have a personal wager with another member of the staff that she goes up instead of dowm, both of us agreeing that she’s a moving personality but differing as to direction. As I say, these three people do acting which is steadily entertaining. W ere it not for the sag toward the finish, the picture would be great instead of merely good. * * HARLEs Chase is on Chicago screens again, in “Dog Shy.” He took the town by storm with his “Mamma Behave,” and it ought not to be long now before exhibitors begin billing his comedies as they deserve. Mr. Chase has the comedy sense. Someone else may or may not plot his gags, but he snaps them across. There is the impression, too, that he insists upon funny ones. At any rate, this comedy, like the other more recent ones before it, is as funny as two reels of film can be made in 99 cases out of 100. That’s funny enough for me. Jtt * Jjs onway Tearle, Agnes Ayres and Aiyce Mills are the three principals in “Morals for Men,” shown last week at the Capitol, Chicago. They work hard but are badly bothered by lack of a logical story and presence of too many wrong subtitles. Also, the Chicago censors seem to have shortened the picture considerably. Mr. Tearle doesn’t get a square deal from the camera in this picture, either. He looks much older than usual, as does Miss Ayres, obviously for lack of proper lighting and photography. Miss Mills may or may not fare better, this being my first glimpse of her. The story’s an involved yarn about the uphill climb of two people who start in the gutter, both of them going to the top and one of them staying there. The point of it seems to be that a man can get away with anything, whereas a woman can hope for nothing better than a chance to commit suicide in the last reel. It’s an old idea and has been brought out better than this in probably a hundred earlier productions. — ^T. O. Service. goes steadily forward, : writing subtitles for Various c Dolores Del Rio, Lloyd Hughes, Alex B. Francis, and Clarissa Selwynne in ’’High Steppers,” a First National. f thing, simple common sense being a supplemental requirement. Just as technical musical education is wasted upon the person who has no ear for music, so is rhetorical drilling wasted upon the person who simply doesn’t know what sounds right. The technically educated person may get away with a concerto after enough years, as the rhetorically drilled person may grind out a novel of a sort, but the individual with nature on his side has become a genius meanwhile ! It is these latter that are needed for motion pictures. * * * Adolphe Menjou, Chester Conk. lin and Louise Brooks are three good reasons for “A Social Celebrity.” It is splendid entertainment down to the finish, where it looks as if somebody blew a whistle and everybody washed up. The big item that should have comprised the last reel simply isn’t there. Mr. Menjou is good for four bits of my money, however, in much less picture than this. This time he’s a small town barber who goes to the city and is persuaded to pose as a French nobleman. That he’s great as the latter is not so surprising as that he’s great as the former would be if anything he does nowadays could be surprising. But there’s no longer any news to write about Menjou. Chester Conklin is Menjou’s father in the picture, and he’s a dramatic actor! In “A Woman of the World” he was partially that, and perhaps it is because he was so good in that that they gave him the whole road in this. He’s dramatic, here, in a picture that’s