Film Spectator (1927-1928)

Page Fourteen THE FILM SPECTATOR July 23, 1927 gives a human interpretation of a girl in love with Bill Austin, to whom all the acting honors go. The great ability of George Nichols is lost in the part of the silly father of the silly girl. The chief merit of George Marion’s titles is their punctuation, but no one on earth could write titles that would appear to good advantage in such surroundings. * ♦ * Here Is One That Is Full of Blunders According to What Every Girl Should Know, a Warner Brothers production, there is a public office that most Americans do not know exists. It is “governor-general” of the state. Patsy Ruth Miller is trying to get her brother out of jail, and the “governor-general” writes her that he can do nothing about it. A title in this picture also reveals something new. It will be a surprise to those who compile our dictionaries to learn that there is such a word as “alright”. The vitaphone apparently is not the only thing that Warner Brothers have discovered. Another bit of knowledge that I picked up when viewing this picture is that when you say you are going to the dressmaker’s the apostrophe before the s is superfluous. And there were quite a lot of other things that this picture taught me, among them that Ian Keith needs a hair cut, that no legal procedure is necessary to confine children in an orphanage, that it is possible for a girl in such an institution to keep her hair marcelled, that it is quite the proper thing for a well bred girl to open another girl’s hand-bag and read the letters found in it, and that when a girl meets a man in a store she is supposed to take his arm. What Every Girl Should Know is a very poor picture, so poor that it would be amazing if it were not so in keeping with the standard of so many that come from the same studio. Charles Reisner gave us The Better ’Ole, and for that picture I always will be grateful to him, but he displays a total unfitness to handle anything that demands the gentle treatment this other story should have received. Only in the closing sequence does he rise to any heights. Carrol Nye, Pat’s brother, unjustly confined to prison, is liberated in time to attend her wedding, and the family reunion is directed with feeling and sincerity, being the only feature of the entire picture that has any merit in it. A title informs us that Keith has realized suddenly that he loves Pat, but it is not followed by a scene showing him registering the fact. Instead there is a shot of Pat selling a tennis racquet in Dyas’s store. Every narrative title should be followed by something relevant to it. Reisner falls down in his treatment of scenes in the juvenile home. He resorts to the old fashioned idea that the attendants in such an institution are inhuman monsters with faces so hard as to make Buster Keaton look jovial by comparison. It was necessary to make Patsy Ruth and Mickey McBan unhappy in the place, but a director who thoroughly understood the drama in the situation would have shown the attendants as ordinary human beings with kind hearts, but powerless to relieve the harshness and heartlessness of the system they served. Reisner’s direction makes it appear as if the orphanage staff inflicted cruelties on the inmates for the personal satisfaction it derived from it. It would have been a much bigger thought to have shown the staff human and the institution itself cold and unkind. But big thoughts have no place in this picture. A title tells us that visiting day at the penitentiary came for the hundredth time. As there is but one visiting day each month the title would indicate that Nye had been in prison for more than eight years. Perhaps he was, but if such were the case I can’t see why Mickey McBan did not grow a little during the eight years. The audience knows that Nye was innocent, but an insert of a newspaper heading shows that he had had a “notorious career”. Warner Brothers display a positive genius for turning out pictures which display a total lack of genius in their treatment. * ♦ Brainless Bit of Screen Literature WHEN motion pictures cease being just motion pictures there is going to be less discontent with screen entertainment. Even as recently as five years ago it was possible to do things on the screen that can’t be done now. The last vestige of novelty has worn off. We have seen possibly every kind of interior that there is to be seen; we have grown used to all that costume designers can produce to intrigue us, and trick photography, double exposure, multiple shots, and things of that sort are old stuff now. We look clear through the extraneous materials that enter into the making of a picture and have eyes and mind only for the story. We are no more intelligent now than we were a dozen years ago, but all the intelligence we have is centered on the mentality reflected by a picture. Perhaps I can make a short cut to what I am driving at by using Rough House Rosie as an example. It has everything in it that the screen has outgrown and must avoid if it is to make progress. Rosie is a thoroughly wooden picture, one hun — tr 1 p 1 i oia d H 1 B = i ) Importer Collector p 1 3( iBWfl ^ dt> p M ThT Old fyjrics-RareCurios-antiijue Jewelerv 1 Oil jets d’Art Old Color Prints B i P'^'TleTi) 'Tjonlt ^/onT/iDrod. (Panis 1 V Bast SStBStveel: ln1?ine St.TheatreSl. Coiombe^l^eine) ALFRED HUSTWICK | I FILM EDITOR and j TITLE WRITER Permanent Telephone WHitney 3239