Motion Picture Magazine (Aug 1924-Jan 1925)

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of the Month Selected and Reviewed by LAURENCE REID IN HOLLYWOOD WITH POTASH AND PERLMUTTER The Best Comedy THE film industry is burlesqued to a fare-you-well in this extraordinarily funny comedy. While this is an adaptation of Montague Glass' stage success, Business Before Pleasure, it goes much further than depicting the celebrated partners, Abe and Mawruss, in such commercial enterprise as selling "kluks and suits." His stories are rapidly making screen history. There is no question that the latest one will be voted an exceptionally bright and inventive piece of humor. There is a laugh — a regular diaphragm laugh, in every scene — and in nearly every subtitle — and the film is rich in breezy subtitles. These carry truthful wisecracks, characteristic of the author and the partners. It is safe to say that Glass had a great deal to do in fashioning the captions. We follow Abe and Mawress in their efforts to enter and buck the film game. They engage a studio and make Benny Hur, and The Fatal Murder. And in seeing them trying to interest the buyers — and continually arguing over matters of production, certainly gives the picture genuine realism — besides a fulsome quota of laughs. But dont think that most of the fun is contained in the captions. Every time Abe and Mawruss — whether they are in their offices or in the projection-room or out on location — get together, there are scenes of uproarious mirth. It is very clever burlesque of a business which has romance written all over it. And it is true in that many of our film magnates started just like the celebrated partners. Abe is just about to close a deal — when Mawruss says or does something which spoils everything. Or it may be Abe is responsible for the mistakes. Or again, it may be their argumentative wives — who are ever registering complaint. Especially when the partners engage a famous vamp to star in their productions. The shots of the two productions are rich in humor. The partners get in bad with the buyers and the capitalist. Look to the projection-room and have a big laugh. Their names are spread all over the screen. And the wives keep up a constant chatter which brings their husbands to the (Continued DANTE'S INFERNO The Best Costume Picture THIS is what we would call a film "Cook's tour" thru hell. And because it is different, we'll put it down as a distinct novelty. Any picture visualizing the hot regions where all earthly sinners are punished (according to the hell-and-brimstone theories of the old-fashioned preachers) must be chalked up as a radical departure from the conventional pattern. While we catalog it as a costume drama, in that its general scheme is of costume design— —its allegorical scenes have little costume, since the employees and guests of His Satanic Majesty present mostly studies in the nude. It is only in the modern tale interwoven with the allegorical side of it that the picture passes into conventional pastures. For several centuries it has been conceded that Dante is an authority on hell. No writer since the melancholy Florentine has been able to paint it so vividly. Henry Otto in filming the Inferno has achieved a grotesque and fantastic subject. Certainly it offers thrills in its play upon the imagination. It seems to us as if it was a triumph of the cameraman's art. Still, it is entertaining because of the logical building of its modern story — which pictures a supermean man of wealth who refuses to entertain the poor and needy— and who, receiving a copy of the Inferno from one of his unfortunate victims, takes a descent into hell. He takes it via a dream situation — and we are his guests— we, of the audience. It is positively uncanny — yet completely fascinating to watch Virgil guide Dante and the modern sinner into the lower regions. It is a perfect visual sermon on the lesson of being good as hammered home by the brimstone talkers who frightened our forefathers — not so many years ago. We follow Dante, who is led by Virgil, in looking over Satan's acres. Fiery pools of brimstone, rivers of blood, a rain of fire, hundreds of nude figures writhing in agony as the flames and torture give them eternal punishment — these and other equally weird sights greet the eye in a colorful array of grim and picturesque sequences. The millionaire is redeemed after his devilish delirium and it all ends happily for the unfortunates of the modern story. The film is completely acted by Ralph Lewis as the Croesus, Howard Gaye as Virgil, and Lawson Butt as Dante. Butt really resembles the accepted likeness of the m page 89) 53 P PAdiz