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Volume XXXIV
NEW YORK CITY, JULY 17, 1926
No. 3
" Variety"
"X TARIETY," it seems to me, is one of V/ the best motion pictures ever made. Some critics say it is the best. Certainly it marks the furthest step forward in picture technique.
Motion photography becomes a living, breathing force so that the picture speaks to you in the fullness of its own incomparable language. We have talked a good deal about picture expression, that it is an art, that it should prove to be greatest of all arts. "Variety" gives us proof instead of promises.
It is a most valuable contribution to motion pictures not merely because it will set standards in technique but because, if it is seen by that much greater audience beyond the socalled "fans," it will do more than has ever been done to establish that broad respect and understanding which motion pictures deserve and so greatly need.
Lest the reader think "Variety" is one of those so-called "critic's pictures," or "highbrow" pictures, let me point to its gross at the Rialto Theatre last week, namely $34,442, with $6,800 on Monday.
Vacant seats were few. There were waiting lines for every show. Within the theatre an average picture audience sat tensely as this masterly screen story was told them and applauded eagerly. The picture is in for a run.
I would like to know just why the humans who come from the streets and subways around New York's busiest corner, a section assuredly of the masses — just how and why
these patrons differ from those on any old corner. Surely no one will call Forty-second Street and Seventh Avenue a high-brow corner. If there's such a ready and rapidly increasing appreciation here, why shouldn't there be everywhere?
It is true that the names of Emil Jannings, Lya de Putti, E. A. Dupont, are not on the tongues of our moviegoing public, not nationally advertised products, as we say in trade talk. But must we subsist only on names and only on a cut-and-dried audience from whom names only draw admissions?
"Variety" is a wallop of a picture; of allaround interest and appeal. It is different from our mass of pictures principally in that it is painstakingly clever, masterly in construction.
If "Variety" doesn't go everywhere in this country as it starts off at the Rialto; if the word about it doesn't get forth to the huge audience that sniffs at the movies; then something is radically wrong with the American industry of pictures. If our scheme of advertising and selling is so inflexible that we cannot put power back of such a picture, then we'll have to put a small ring around production, tell the writers and artists to go back to other forms of expression, give up the talk about international films, progress in pictures and expansion in business.
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