The Film Spectator (Mar-Dec 1928)

September 29, 1928 THE FILM SPECTATOR Page Nine end of the picture. Something that is not mechanical is Bill Howard's direction. He has succeeded in making beautiful the love between a crook and a lad, and in doing so has avoided the slightest approach to the sickly sentimental touches that most directors have to resort to to advance such a theme. Howard tells the story in a he-man way that makes it both convincing and engrossing. In several places he reveals a rich sense of comedy, and in others a cleverness in avoiding uninteresting time lapses. McLaglen and Stuart enter a clothing store and the former buys the latter a suit of clothes. Nick enters a booth to don his suit. Ordinarily we would have been treated to a fade-out and a fade-in to give him a chance to change his clothes. Howard does it differently and with no apparent effort to cover a lapse. He shows McLaglen trying on hats, the scene reflecting a lively sense of humor both in acting and direction. It is a far cry from this comedy to the tragedy of McLaglen's arrest after he kills Earle Foxe, and likewise there is a great contrast between the thrill of Stuart's escape from a reformatory and the sweetness of the culmination of his romance with Lois Moran, but in all the widely differing phases of the story Howard shows the same sureness and intelligence. Unquestionably he is entitled to a place among our very best directors. For the first time Victor McLaglen has given a performance that satisfies me completely. As the river pirate he is nothing but a big, rough-neck law-breaker, but he succeeds in making the character one that appeals to you on account of its tenderness and sympathy. Nick Stuart is a lad who is destined to have a brilliant screen career. H I remember correctly, I made the same prediction about him after seeing him in a small part in one of his first pictures. His work in The River Pirate justifies my early prediction. He has an immense capacity for enlisting the sympathies of an audience, and has an ability that is rare among the youths of the screen — that of playing character roles with all the finish and sincerity of an old trouper. Perhaps the individual feature of the picture that intrigued me most was Donald Crisp's return to us as an actor. His part does not permit him to do much more than remind us what a splendid artist he is, and to make me hope that in the future he will be kept in front of the camera instead of behind it. Earle Foxe plays a cringing gangster with the sincerity that has characterized his work since he escaped from two-reel comedies. I understand that Winfield Sheehan has big plans for him, and I have no doubt of his ability to handle them in a big way. Lois Moran does excellently as the girl. She is another who is coming along fine under the Fox Winifred Dunn Current Scenarios "SUBMARINE" Columbia "ADORATION" First National banner. In this picture I was treated to one brief glimpse of Oscar, my favorite motion picture actor. He plays the part of a bootblack, for which he has been rehearsing for years on the Lasky lot. The fruits of his conscientious preparation are apparent in every stroke of his brushes and every inch of his grin. AU my friend Oscar needs ii a real opportunity. « « * Patsy Ruth Miller Has a Picture All to Herself TO-MORROW is all Patsy Ruth Miller. The story picks her up as a coy young flapper and follows her through until she becomes a pathetic old woman who uses cosmetics and hair-dye in a fruitless attempt to make the years stand still. It is rather a remarkable performance that the young woman gives. Between our visions of her having a good time at a young people's dance and a scene showing her pleading with a policeman not to arrest her for the murder of her husband, there is demand upon her for wide range of expression, and the manner in which she meets the demands indicates that we yet will include Patsy Ruth in our limited circle of beautiful girls who are dramatic actresses. To-Morrow is an interesting picture. It is about something, and sticks to its discussion of it. Companionate marriage is the theme, a social question in which my lack of interest is vast. It probably is all right as a box-office theme, but Tiffany-Stahl did not rely solely on that fact to render the picture commercial; they made it entertaining, and even if you are as indifferent to companionate marriage as I am, you will find the picture is well worth seeing for the pleasure it will give you in watching Pat's performance. James Flood made a good job of the direction; in fact, I think it is one of the best things he has done, but there are one or two things I do not agree with, and which might be discussed profitably. Patsy Ruth comes home from a dance and tells her parents that she is going to enter into a contract marriage. The father stands on one side of the room, the mother on the other side, and Pat in the middle. As the matter is discussed the only way the characters can be shown on the screen is in a series of choppy close-ups. There is no suggestion of family entity in the grouping or editing. The proper manner in which to handle the sequence would be to bring the group together to suggest the family idea and to enable all the action to be registered in a medium shot, making unnecessary the flickering procession of close-ups. For a brief moment at the end of the sequence we see the whole room, and discover that all the time we were hopping from one close-up to another, Pat's grandmother was in the room. In another sequence Pat indulges in a tirade against her husband in particular and the heartlessness of fate in general. She does it splendidly, taking herself so seriously that she becomes dramatic, which is the manner in which the scene should be handled. It is the sort of scene that gets its dramatic strength purely from its duration; the longer it is held the stronger it becomes. However, it reaches the screen in chunks, a perfect example of ignorant editing. Obviously no one with authority over the picture understood what the sequence was about. But To-Morrow is a worthy picture nevertheless. It shows what dreadful things probably will happen to a young couple starting life on the companionate mar