The Film Daily (1918)

Sunday. November 24, 1918 TdijA DAILY 13 Unsympathetic Characters in Mechanical Situations Fail Utterly To Start Anything Catherine Calvert in "MARRIAGE" Frank Keeney=Sherry DIRECTOR James Kirkwood AUTHOR Guy Bolton SCENARIO BY Bennett Musson TECHNICAL DIRECTOR Jack Unander CAMERAMAN Lawrence Williams AS A WHOLE Unsympathetic characters moving mechanically through situations that were not new and failed utterly to register. STORY Ancient eternal triangle poorly camouflaged; was painfully mechanical. DIRECTION Failed to get touch of sincerity into characterizations and registered action too mechanically to get it over. PHOTOGRAPHY Varied greatly from good to poor LIGHTINGS Some very good, many too uniform CAMERA WORK Varied in rather aggravating manner. STAR Lacked appeal in straight sorfetv woman character and seemed always to be "acting." SUPPORT Failed to convince at any time. Were painfully crude. EXTERIORS Acceptable; not particularly dis= tinctive. INTERIORS Some rather good but not photo= graphed to best advantage. DETAIL Many unnecessary bits CHARACTER OF STORY Entire production misses because of lack of sympathy. All the principals are rotters. LENGTH OF PRODUCTION About 5,000 ft. CONSIDERING this story as it has been visualized, it would seem advisable for Guy Bolton to stick to his musical plays. Of course, considerable of the blame rests with the director and players because the director has allowed the action to be painfully mechanical with so much of "people in and out" that it became very tiresome, while the players were all so busy "acting." that they never at any time really convinced with a single emotion. Nevertheless, we must hang most of the blame on Mr. Bolton because the story itself is one of those crude eternal triangle plots such as has been done to death in the films at least 500 times. We have the busy husband neglecting society-wife, with he-wamp proposing an elopement. Hubby went broke and blind at the same time, so wifey refused to elope with willun. Scorning willun's wealth, wifey became a card cheat to finance the operation for hubby's eyes, but incidentally she spent much money on her own pleasure and lived in luxury. Willun discovered wifey cheating just as hubby conveniently arrived home with his sight. Willun forced wifey to turn over her latchkey by threatening to expose her cheating, with wifey shifting the blame in her own conscience to the fact that her pal cheat had said she was expecting a baby and couldn't be exposed just now. Anyway, hubby arrived and they pulled the scene from "The Easiest Way," where willun walked in with the latchkey and hubby started to struggle, but decided he wouldn't because Thomas Holding was playing the willun, and being considerable smaller than Thomas, Dave Powell apparently thought better of it, although I have a hunch that most of the audience will want to kick him for quitting. Then hubby went out to get a gun and came back in time to hear wifey confess that she had cheated to get the coin, this confession being forced by willun's threat to expose her unless she surrendered to him at 9 o'clock. Of course, hubby then forgave wifey and apparently the poor boobs who had been trimmed from all their coin thought it was all right, too. Anyway, the picture ended. Miss Calvert, the wife in this, failed utterly. She seemed to be registering the same expressions for most any emotion and was generally bla-a-amed. The other players were mechanical, and even Dave Powell, who generally gives a pretty good performance, "acted" quite some. There was a shocking variance in the photography and lighting which jarred a lot, particularly in one sequence where they had some very dark sets on the lower floor of a home with Calvert and Powell marching upstairs into a hallway which was quite brilliantly lighted from nowhere in particular. There were scores of unnecessary scenes such as going in and out of doors and getting in and out of cabs, the general technique of the construction being about four years old. The lettering of the titles was bad since it made them hard to read without noticing the design of the lettering, and many of these titles were painfully crude, as to the wording. Many of these technical faults could have been excused, however, had this carried any genuine heart interest or sympathy, or had we been able to center about one or two personalities and really grow to like them. As this stands now. I would say that it is painfully tiresome and decidedly lacking in appeal or entertainment value. The moral has been registered so many hundreds of times that it doesn't get anywhere, the apparent answer to all such cases is that the wife should go to work. It would at least have been better if she lived in poverty herself and sent all the coin made by cheating to hubby. That might have held a touch of sympathy for her character. Others in the cast were Ida Darling, Hazel Alden and Walter Hiers. I Can't Figure That They'll Like This But Title May Help Some The Box Office Analysis for the Exhibitor The title of this may attract some of the curious, but I would go very easy about grabbing it because it is quite bla-a-a-a, painfully mechanical and decidedly lacking in the all-essential element of sympathetic appeal. I doubt if Catherine Calvert has registered in any community sufficiently to justify your booking a very ordinary offering because of her presence, and really it would seem to me if you ever hope to get her over that it would be good business to dodge this one. because certainly she is not going to register very well in it. It is rather dangerous to tell them that the plot of this has to do with a wife who cheats at cards to help a blind husband in preference to taking money from the he-wamp, because that idea of wifey struggling to help hubby who is ill has been done to death on the screen in hundreds of different pieces of footage. If you have an off evening that you can afford to slip them a blue one. once in a while, you can probably get this by and do a little business just on the strength of the name, but it certainly seems to me that you should keep the soft pedal on with both feet shoving hard if you decide to show it. If you figure that you can run wild, you can gather enough trick lines from outline of the plot given above, to frame most anything you like, such as "Would you become a card cheat to help your husband regain his sight?" Or "What would you do for your husband?", etc.