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Shadow } Staie
A Department
of Photoplay
Review
By Julian Johnson
Editor's Note: The overture to the monthly discussion is a consideration of five huge productions. Each of these dreadnought dramas has been designed as a full evening's entertainment. More money twos spent upon each than upon the preparation of any Broadway "show" you might name, and should each be unrolled in its original uncut substance it would, tike a feat of Chinese histrionism, link many nights together. The comment upon "Civilisation," "The Fall of a Nation," and "Macbeth" is by Randolph Bartlett, of the New York staff of Photoplay Magazine.
WE weary of every earthly thing — save the sea. The echoes of its first mysterious call have not ceased to sound through the ages, and it has kept a lure for every man who lias been on. in or about it, from the first argonautic (ireek to the latest commander of a U-boat. It was the sea which Herbert Brenon chose as canvas and ruling tint for his first heroic camera painting. "Neptune's Daughter;" and half a year ago, when he took the fabrics and arms of another Damascus, ten tribes of players, a seraglio of beauty, the edificers of a capital city, a day's steel from Bethlehem, the building materials of a new Jerusalem and the world's champion wet woman — he took them back to the sea. It was toward Jamaica that he steered the celluloid armada of William Fox. some time in the autumn of 1915 ; and it is from Jamaica that he comes in the early summer of 1916. with a great photographic ultramarine still wearing its prop handle — the sort thev give unborn plays for convenience *ake— "The Daughter of the Gods." Miss
Annette Kellerman, sweetly lustrous fish in "Neptune's Daughter," is the finny queen of the new expression.
It is not upon a scene of grandeur or voluptuousness that this curtain of shadowrises, but upon a little girl who sorrows because her caged canary pines for freedom. She releases it to join a frolicsome sparrow which parades its liberty in a nearby wood. But a dog— alas ! — uses the sparrow as an entree, and the canary, finding free loneliness more terrible than solitary confinement, flies out over the sea, and flies, and flies, and flies until it falls. The lonely little royal child, pining like the lonely little free canary, soon sends its wee spirit winging out over the ocean of eternity. And there is a king's son, too, who finds a coracle on the crystal beach of the palace keep. and. as his guard slumbers, paddles out, and out, and out — and over he goes.
Enter tailed water-sprites whom Brenon learned to call by name three years ago. It is theirs to reincarnate the water-killed children ; and, reincarnated and matured,
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