The Film Spectator (Mar-Dec 1928)

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April 28, 1928 THE FILM made a great many dollars. I don't suppose even Charlie Chaplin can match his fortune. The financial aspect of the Lloyd comedies interests me only as it supports my variously expressed opinion that there always is a market for mentality. I have said repeatedly that what most pictures lack is downright cleverness. We turn them out now so rapidly that there is no time to make them original. If one of the big producers put Harold Lloyd under contract to-day, Harold agreeing to the terms offered him, we would get three, and perhaps four, Lloyd pictures a year. They would be like the Haines, Dix and other comedies and would make some money, but not half as much as Harold makes now by his one-picture-a-year policy. As picture-making is a money-making endeavor, I am surprised that other producers do not profit by their contemplation of the Lloyd method. Hasn't it occurred to someone that if Buster Keaton were put on a one-a-year schedule, and that the whole year were consumed in making the one as clever as possible, he soon would be making five dollars to every one that he is making now? His pictures would have time to be clever. Cleanliness and cleverness constitute a screen combination that can't be beaten, « * * Beautiful Picture, But It Lacks Story Value RAMONA is a beautiful picture. If I were a director or a producer I would rather have it to my credit than ninety per cent, of the pictures I have seen thus far this year. Edwin Carewe directed it intelligently, and it contains excellent performances and superb photography. Yet despite the fact that it has all the superficial essentials to picture perfection, it is not being hailed by the public as one of the great pictures of the year. It will not be an outstanding success financially, which shows that a picture must have something besides acting and scenery. In endeavoring to satisfy ourselves with the reasons why Ramona has not scored a greater success we may find out things that will profit us to remember when we make other pictures. We can find only a few faults with the direction. I think Carewe painted with too bold strokes. He made Vera Lewis too hard and unrelenting. It is pointed out in a title that Miss Lewis has a distinct grievance against Dolores Del Rio, but the individuality of the grievance is lost when everyone else in the picture except her son, is made a victim of it. A more logical characterization of the mother would have shown her subjecting only Dolores to harsh treatment. After Dolores and Warner Baxter have been married for some years they smile and smirk at one another continually, which no people do after they've been married for any leng^th of time. Ed Carewe ought to know that. The greatest fault in characterization was that of Roland Drew. His grief over the marriage of Dolores to another man is exaggerated grotesquely. Five years after the wedding he still is in a daze. If he had suffered as greatly during that period as we see him suffering at the end of it, he would have lost his mind. That concludes my indictment of the direction, which, all told, does not consume much footage, not enough to mar an otherwise perfect picture. The reason Ramona did not appeal to me is because no reason was given why it should. A half-breed girl of a century ago is not of sufficient importance to enlist my interest, and the tragedy of her romance was not complicated SPECTATOR Page Eleven enough to hold my interest. Ramona is a biography of a girl who does nothing in the picture to merit having her biography written. If a villain had crossed her path and made her the victim of a complicated plot I could have become intrigued with the manner in which the plotter was foiled. If the story had been based on a theme I would have been interested in its treatment. But there is no theme. The girl is uninterestingly virtuous from the first, and the men are the souls of honor, something that becomes good screen material only when it has to fight against odds to remain so. Dolores' baby dies. It just dies. The death has nothing to do with anything else in the story. Pillagers ride in from some unknown place and destroy Ramona's home. We don't know who they are; we have not seen them previously, and we do not see them again. Unless we can be interested somewhat in them as personalities we can not be interested greatly in anything they do. Ramona is a picture that emphasizes the value of the tie-up. It shows that a straight narrative free of complications is not good screen material. No picture has to exert itself to cause me to shed tears, yet I was tmmoved when Ramona's baby died and could not share the grief of the mother. I was delighted with the long procession of beautiful scenes, but less beauty and more story value would have held my interest more closely. * • * Production Good, But Story Lacking in Logic MAN-Made Women, the last Leatrice Joy picture made by De Mille, contains some of the nicest bits of direction I have seen in a long time. Paul Stein is particularly effective in putting over his time lapses. He shows dinner guests assembling in the drawing-room, then by a succession of close-up dissolves, each of one place at a table, he shows the progress of an entire meal. He carries the same idea through an evening at bridge and ends with hands reached out for wraps. He shows an entire evening in about thirty seconds of dissolves. In several other places in the picture he makes further intelligent use of the dissolve to advance his story by skipping lightly over the non-essentials. But eversrthing in the production is not to his credit. He has four of his dinner guests lined up as rigidly as a mixed quartette while they are awaiting the butler's announcement. Guests at a social function do not stand in a straight line, elbows touching, and grinning urbanely at nothing whatever. The only director who can make a social gathering look absolutely natural is Harry D'Arrast, and the chief reason for his success is that he realizes that all the guests do not face the same way all the time. Stein gives us a group of four guests standing in an absolutely straight line, which is quite unlike what four guests would do unless they were drunk and wanted to sing "Sweet Adeline." Leatrice Joy, H. B. Warner, John Boles and Seena Owen give very good performances in Man-Made Women, and the photography brings out all the values in a thoroughly adequate production, consequently it is a picture that I can recommend to the exhibitor readers of The Spectator, which point they should keep in mind while they read what more I have to say about it. The person who falls down in this production is Ernest Pascal, the author of the story. It is a variation of the taming of the shrew theme, treated illogically. Leatrice leaves her husband (Boles) and Harry Warner, himself in