Moving Picture World (Jan-Feb 1927)

412 MOVING PICTURE WORLD February 5, 1927 VUF-::: AXOTHER long run for Warner Brothers began at the Se.wyn on Thursday, with John Barrymore, Dolores Costello and Vitaphone as the stellar talent. In the picture, “When A Man Loves,” Miss Costello gives quite the finest performance of her brief and scintillant career on the silver screen — “ a Pickford and Maude Adams combined," as one gray haired man, we heard, expressed it. Barrymore, of course, was Barrymore, but it seemed to us many scenes he gave the stage to Miss Costello, for which no one could criticize him, even his most ardent admirers. * Vic Shapiro, commanding the advance guard at United Artists, addressed the members of The Better Films Committee, National Board of Review, at the Waldorf last week, on the motion picture as an art. As might be expected Vic closed his speech with an epigram. Here it is : “And so, on behalf of my confreres who put over artistic pictures commercially, I drink a toast to you, who put over commercial pictures artistically.” Now everyone, not at the gathering, is wondering in just what kind of liquid it was that Vic drank that toast. Perhaps somebody overlooked a bet? Arthur Brisbane, serious minded editor, has his fling at the popular “Mayor of Beverly Hills,” our own Will Rogers, all because he said he had never heard of “China invading anyone’s country.” Mr. Brisbane cites the exploits of the late Genghis Khan and intimates that if China’s 400,000,000 only got another Genghis working, “Mayor Rogers might live to throw his rope in bitter captivity.” To which Beverly Hills’ First Citizen might reply, that Genghis pulled his stuff some years before China got “civilized,” If worst comes to worst, however, our guess is that Will Rogers will be able to “chew” his way out somehow. £ Reports that Fred Thomson has left F. B. O. to join Jesse Lasky’s trained troupe and has taken his peerless horse Silver King with him, have not yet been publicly confirmed, but then they haven’t been denied either. Someone, however, has been mighty busy spreading the story that Fred is now taking down, or is about to take down, a weekly salary of just $15,000. At least this statement has been printed in no less than three dailies, which we have seen, and everybody knows the dailies never exaggerate. Without commenting on what a loss this deservedly popular star would be to F. B. O. (al ways presuming that the reports are correct) and what an addition he would make to the F. P.-L. stellar galaxy, or any other star group for that matter, we are prone to ponder on the fact that aforetime, Fred Thomson was just a parson, and, we understand, a very good one. As such he is surely the highest priced “circuit rider” that ever bestrode a horse and went forth to preach by the wayside. Fifteen grand a week calls for a powerful lot of preaching, brother, but then Fred Thomson is some spellbinder. * Charlie Chaplin, looking more like his old self again, visited the Newspaper Club on Old Timers’ Night last Saturday with Nathan Burkan, his host and attorney, and received a wonderful ovation. He thanked the newspapermen present for the consideration shown him in his recent domestic difficulties and then, by special request, gave his famous imitation of a Spanish bullfighter. It can alas, never reach the screen, because so much of it depends on the Chaplin voice as well as the Chaplin pantomime, but it stopped the show. No newspaperman there will ever be able to write of Chaplin in future without thinking of it and inwardly again applauding this peerless laughmaker. Watterson Rothacker, who is now basking on the sunny shell strewn shores of the West Indies, recalled to us just before he left, that exactly seventeen years ago this week, with Carl Laemmle and R. H. Cochrane, he lunched in a Loop restaurant in Chicago. When they came out the Industrial Films, Ltd., had been formed and Wat handed in his resignation as managing editor of the Billboard. Later, he bought out his partners, changed the name of the company to his own and went to it. Last year he sold out for something like a cool million and retired, turning over the industrial end of his business to his brother, Douglas Rothacker. A bit of drama here, right out of the laboratory, as it were, that makes you realize what a great business this is. London despatches tell of a fog so thick that movie audiences had to get frog checks and go home, because they couldn’t see the screen. This compares with the story of the flagstaff on Wimbledon Common, so tall that it took two men and a boy to see to the top of it, looking in relays. But it isn’t quite such good British propaganda. * Film Daily’s Year Book, just out, is unquestionably the most valuable reference volume ever contributed to the literature of this industry. It represents an amount of painstaking labor and conscientious effort, that is truly tremendous. Its usefulness to every one in the motion picture business can hardly be measured. To Jack Alicoate, Maurice Kann and the members of Film Daily’s able staff, who have put it together, the thanks of all in the industry are due, and will be many times during the coming year. THE vanishing need of motion picture censorship is well illustrated in the recent report of the Maryland State Board of Censors to Governor Albert L. Ritchie. Out of 6,484 pictures submitted between Oct. 1. 1925 and Sept. 30, 1926, only one was absolutely barred. Trifling eliminations were made in some 584 pictures, or about nine per cent, of the total number passed upon. At this rate the last movie censor ought to become extinct about the year 1930, except for the fact that motion picture censorship is now more of a fat political job, than it is anything else. Certainly, it is of no value to the film industry and as far as being of any particular public service its excuse for existence is steadily becoming less apparent to people of unbiased minds. * Paul Morris, the new director of publicity at the Roxy Theatre, who for the past two years has been musical critic of the Evening World, can properly lay claim to being the first newspaper motion picture critic on Broadway. Back in 1913, long months, before the Strand opened its doors, Morris was musical critic on the old New York Herald, John C. Flinn, at the time, being dramatic editor of the same sheet. The musical season being over, some bright mind on the Herald executive staff conceived that it might be a good idea to have the Broadway movie houses "covered” and Morris was assigned to the job. As no advertising was forthcoming, however, the idea didn’t pan out. A few months later the Evening Mail started the first real movie department in any New York newspaper, but Morris was undoubtedly the first regularly assigned newspaper movie critic. * R. W. Baremore and his new boss, E. M. Asher, are looking after the exploitation of “MacFadden’s Flats,” with Charlie Murray and Chester Conklin, which comes into the Strand next week. The producers are Asher, Small & Rogers and the advance “info” is that the film’s a riot. It ought to be with such a bunch of talent. * The N. Y. Times quotes Cecil B. DeMille as saying the “prescription picture is doomed.” Fine! Now let us doom the “tabloid newspaper, the radio “bedtime story” and all the rest of them. Life would then be wonderful, indeed.