Exhibitors Herald (1927)

October 8, 1927 EXHIBITORS HERALD 43 rHIS department contains news, information and gossip on current productions. It aims to supply service which will assist the exhibitor in keeping in touch with developments in connection with pictures and picture personalities — and what these are doing at the box office. No prophecies on the entertainment value of pictures are made. Opinions expressed are simply those of the author or of his contributors and the reader is requested to consider them only as such. — EDITOR’S NOTE. THE BE BE WINS AGAIN 1~^EBE DANIELS, America’s favorite coed, wins for the old school again in “Swim, Girl, Swim.” This time the school is not the familiar Colfax hut Dana (try to yodel that into a college yell) and there is no single scholastic competitor but a string of them. It’s too bad girls don’t play football, but Bebe does very well with this swimming thing, and there’s still basketball in the basket, not to mention debate. For my part, they can go right on giving Miss Daniels these collegiate things until they run out of subjects and then they can begin over again. In this picture Miss Daniels starts off to even worse than the usual disadvantage. She’s a quite hopeless bug hunter, pal of a screamingly funny professorial person whose name I don’t recall, and the personable James Hall is miles out of her campus sphere. With the help of a channel storm and one Gertrude Ederle, however, she manages to overcome all and sundry difficulties in time to paddle the school to victory and slip into a somewhat clammy embrace with the desirable young man at the finish. The captions in this one are better than those in most of its predecessors, and we young folks who saw it at the Oriental theatre last week had many a hearty laugh at and with it all. “ AFTER MIDNIGHT” ORMA SHEARER and Lawrence Gray are the principal performers in “After Midnight,” about which I will say as little as possible for reasons of which I will say more. It’s like this: These pictures that depict the exciting people and events distinguishing nocturnal activity in the country’s major cities puzzle me. I think I ought not to live in Chicago if I am to air my reactions to them, for I can find nothing like them in either the highways or the byways of this town, although the newspapers (particularly those published elsewhere) assure me that Chicago is the last word in matters of this kind. I confess to having explored both the inns and the outs of our community, not once but repeatedly, without encountering anything like the pictures assure us is to be encountered by even the stray youth and maiden from the hinterland. By T. O. SERVICE Not, understand, that there isn’t plenty going on of evenings in this gay town. Rather that the things which go on are not the ones that seem to appeal to fiction writers as subjects for pictorial representation.. As a matter of fact, I have a deeply grounded suspicion that the people who compose these night-life chronicles live in Succotash, New Mexico, and get their dope out of True Confessions. In “After Midnight,” for instance, Miss Shearer is an unmistakably nice young person who sells cigarettes in a night club and saves a thousand dollars doing so — without accepting gratuities. Mr. Gray is a promising young stick-up man who feels that he has made himself honest, after being knocked out of consciousness and into love by Miss Shearer, by discarding his lead pipe in favor of a taxicab. The girl who plays Miss Shearer’s sister (I know her name as well as my own but it gets away at the moment) is a member of the night club chorus and, though she attends parties where guests received thousand-dollar bonds as favors, is always broke. The incidents wrapped about these three people, as well as the settings in which they occur, are made to seem reasonable hut not quite important. This, of course, to me and to me alone. As I say, I feel that I have no business writing about pictures that I don’t believe, and so I'll not do so. BEERY HATTON T X HERE is quite a lot of good humor in “Fireman Save My Child,” but it seems pretty well spread out. Viewing the picture at the Roosevelt, an ideal place, I had the impression that the many Beery-Hatton fans about me were eager to laugh and irksome of delay. Perhaps the telephone-booth gag in the first caption got ’em off to wrong expectations, or perhaps the publicity loomed between audience and screen, but they didn’t roar as they did at the army and navy classics. (Perhaps the Pullman uniform, never adequately employed in comedy, is the one that the boys should be given next.) The individual incidents in “Fireman Save My Child” are very funny. The school house sequence is good, the brass pole sequence is excellent and the piano footage is superb. Even the banana stand stunt gets across on its fourth recurrence. It is during the lulls, which seem over numerous for the footage, that the older pictures come out of the shadows and smirk at you (or rather me) with devastating effect. I should like to view the picture again in company with someone who has seen neither of its predecessors. “ SECRETS OF THE SOUL” w E, meaning the office staff, are having a lot of entertainment these days at the Playhouse, where the Messrs. Mindlin are getting away with a fine high grade of murder and charging the populace plenty for the same. I wrote of the project recently in this space, specifically commenting on “Potemkin,” and so it is necessary at this time to add only that the coffee and cigarettes continue to draw and the caption writer to entertain. The pictures continue unimportant. “Secrets of the Soul,” second of the series, is a German production illustrating some of Dr. Sigmund Freud’s favorite and better known theories. A somewhat rotund citizen’s knife phobia is psychoanalyzed in plain view of the audience and the censors, who no doubt would be more than a little surprised if they knew what it’s all about. Its commercial exhibition usefulness is about onehalf of nil, but the Playhouse salesmanship surrounding it is worth the money. (I shudder to think what these boys could do in a box office way if they had a real picture to work with.) I find myself peculiarly divided on the subject of this “Little Cinema” thing. My admiration for a good picture is such that I suffer tremendously while the Playhouse pictures are on; but my admiration for a good showman is such that I sit through the celluloid monstrosities for the laugh that lies in the captions fore and aft. It is for these that I consider the project worthy of attention. If I could sell the commercial exhibitor on the wisdom of stealing the Mindlins’ act (without their pictures) I should count no number of words too many to have written. I shall make another attempt, in a more extended article, at a later date.