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The Man
You Hate To Love
Without His Dress-Suit, Lowell Sherman Is No Passionate Chiropodist
By FAITH SERVICE
I WAS all set to call tins storv " Plavmg With Life." It was to be all about that suave dilettante, Lowell Sherman, and his method and mannerism of mauling the poor jade, Life, about. It seemed to me to be a swell idea.
It was prompted by watching .Mr. Sherman through a succession of white-gloved villainies on stage and screen. Capped bv his self-directed performance in "Lawful Larceny." Surely, here was a charming exterior masking a — oh, but I can't go on. I don't know you well enough. . . Anyway, he crabbed m'copy. It was Robert Browning who said, "() make us happy and you make us good."
Mr. Sherman, I am afraid, is happy. Work out the rest for yourself. It pains me to say it.
A shrewd observer recently spoke of Lowell Sherman another shrewd observer) and his marriages, and said, " Pauline Garon was right for him as hf serms. Helene Costcllo is right for him as he is."
A rrrv astute comment. For Lowell Sherman, like so manv charming and civilized persons, is not as he seems — on the screen. He says, "It would be so monotonous, dear." He does say "dear." But not in the sugar-daddyon-the-make fashion of old B'way. There is something very kindly about him. I'm sorry, but there is. Kindly .uul tolerant and seasoned — and young.
That Is the Question
II is one of this civilized person's chief contentions that actors should not carry their professional char;icters with them into real life. "If you must be a pasMonate chiropodist on the screen," he asks, "must you be a passionate chiropodist off the screen.'" And the answer to that seems fairly obvious.
Mr. Sherman — you naturally call him Mister Sherman, .ind not Lowell-ole-man — maintains that this is one • I "n why actors arc held in faint contempt or viewed ■i museum pieces bv the laity. They are museum pieces. Ihcy insist upon being museum pieces. They will strike
Spurr
their museum attitudes, when no attitudinizing is called for. They persist in going about the face of the earth being sheiks, vampires. Great Lovers, perpetual ingenues, traducers of virtue, devastating heroes and what-haveyou, when they have stepped from the studio gates to the route the milkman takes . . "So amusing, dear. . "
Nor, Mr. Sherman holds, does a screen hero, to be a screen hero, need to be comrx)unded of milk and honey. The greatest of them all, \'alentino, could not well have been labeled a mama's boy. He did not exude the effluvium of prayer-books and Sunday schools. He was, really, quite a bad boy to begin with, though he usually came out in the last reel chastised and with his mind on Higher Things. Which is the way, dear, life should be . . . progressive.
Why Villains Are Loved
"/CONSISTENT virtue on the screen, dear, is the very skim-milk of monotony. Americans love the conquest of virtue over vice. And in the black heart of a white-gloved villain, one note of sincerity, a mere sou peon of heart-break is more genuinely poignant, more moving, than whole reels of — well, we won't say who, dear — being steadfast and dependable."
(Continued on page 8o)
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