The Film Daily (1918)

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Sunday, August 25, 1918 iM*k A1LY Routine Western Meller Given Ordinary Production. Is Just "Movie" William Desmond in "WILD LIFE" Triangle DIRECTOR Henry Otto AUTHOR M. V. Dearing SCENARIO BY Chas. J. Wilson, Jr. CAMERAMAN Steve Norton AS A WHOLE Bill's pleasing personality lost in very ordinary western meller that has nothing to recommend it. STORY Mechanical dovetailing of old situations fails to get anywhere and never stirs up interest. DIRECTION Obtained one good shot of coach go= ing over cliff but failed to make other action interesting. Let things happen very conve= niently. PHOTOGRAPHY. .Just good, straight stuff; not artistic LIGHTINGS. . . .Generally too uniform; a few good bits CAMERA WORK Satisfactory STAR Pleasing Hero utterly handicapped by story and mechanical direction. SUPPORT Satisfactory EXTERIORS No attempt to pick new western locations. INTERIORS The same old stand=bys DETAIL Convenient CHARACTER OF STORY Routine western LENGTH OF PRODUCTION About 4,500 feet IT SURE is hard on poor old Bill Desmond to have to depend on this kind of stuff to keep his following, let alone build it. Bill has a very pleasing personality and I'm sure he makes a hit with the fair sex everywhere but he can't overcome the handicap of such ordinary material as we get here. This isn't terrible, it's just very, very ordinary. It's not any worse than the stuff they have been giving Bill for the past few months, but that's bad enough and I'll bet that Bill is commencing to realize it as much as anyone. You can't get a jolt out of the present-day entertainment shoppers with just passable stuff and certainly that is all this ever amounts to. Bill appears in this as the bad, bad man of a bad western town and when Josie Sedgwick is sent to the town by an employment agency, thinking she is to obtain a position as a waitress, she finds she has been tricked and is forced to become a dance-hall girl. Bill falls for her and thinking she is like all the rest, kisses her, in return for which she slaps him on the face. And this is the blow that causes Bad Bill's reform. Ed Brady is the willun who attempts to get fresh with Josie which causes a battle when Hero Bill interferes. Then they plant an incident where Bill drops his handkerchief, which had his initial on it for the purposes of the scenario, so that later when willun kills a man, he plants Bill's handkerchief on the scene of the hold-up and Bill is accused. Bill escapes arrest and starts to make his get-away when he comes upon the overturned stage coach and finds willun's dying pal, whom Bill had once befriended, with the result that the pal confesses that willun did the doity woik and Bill is vindicated. And they finish as per usual with Bill and Josie in the clutch, having adopted the baby of the dead victim of willun's stagecoach hold-up to start out in life with. The scene showing the stage-coach rolling over the precipice after the horses had broken loose following the hold-up, was very well done and offers the only real thrill in the production. It looks very much as if this had "jest happened" because there was a driver on the seat when it went over and he jumped just in time to escape serious injury. Anyway the thrill registered and will no doubt get a gasp from most audiences. In one place they had Bill lose his hat when he was making his get-away, so he could ride back and pick it up from the saddle but this thing has been done so many times and was so obviously planted the way we got it here that it fails to get over as anything but a "playing to the gallery" stunt. Others in the cast were: Dot Hagar, Orral Humphries, Graham Pette, Eddie Peters and Bill Patton. WID'S YEAR BOOK— Out Next Month— Get Ad Copy in Early.