Motion Picture Classic (May 1921 - Dec 1927)

Famous By JEROME reproached by the late and Henry E. Krehbiel, on account of what they unnecessary feast of an “I WANTS to make your flesh I creep!” said the Fat Boy in * “Pickwick Papers,” and that evidently was the intention of Victorien Sardou when he devised the plot of his melodramatic play “La Tosca.” Horror is heaped upon horror’s head after the first act, and in the second the author spares his audience no detail of cruelty and terror save the actual torture of Cavaradossi by the minions of Scarpia, but his groans of agony, heard thru the part opened door of the torture chamber, are sufficiently unnerving. Sardou has been William Winter arcades ambo, regarded as horrors in this play, which today is best known in its operatic form, for the drama, originally written as a vehicle for the talents of Sarah Bernhardt, is now seldom given. But the French dramatist might have retorted that he had distinguished exemplars in the old Greek tragic writers, Sophocles and Euripides, who in such plays as “CEdipus Rex,” “Medea,” “Antigone,” “The Trojan Women,” and others, allowed pitiless fate to condemn innocent characters to every kind of mental as well as physical torture. “La Tosca” does not strictly follow the Greek tragic models. Rosa Raisa is one of the modern Toscas. She looks the part of the great Roman singer and her interpretation is superb. She sings for the Chicago Opera Company. In the oval is Antonio Scotti, the greatest of all Scarpias Photograph by Mishkin, N. Y Undeniably the most popular Tosca ever known is Geraldine Farrar. Beauty, voice and dramatic intensity combined in rare degree in her interpretation f I Photograph (right) by Mishkin Above is Sarah Bernhardt in the title role of La Tosca, for whom Victorien Sardou conceived his melodramatic plot in the first place Photograph © by Mishkin, N. Y WP (Thirty-four)