Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1916)

86 Photoplay Magazine and Charles Ray; and "The Return of Draw Egan," a Hart picture, are the best of the month's output. A story well-told, but missing in its pictorial phrases the extraordinary dash and brilliance of the typed original, is "Somewhere in France," Richard Harding Davis's brief masterpiece. Charles Giblyn has directed this, with great care and generally fine effects, and much military and continental accuracy. Louis Glaum, as the vamping spy, and Howard Hickman, as the spy's heroic and avenging brother, are the principal performers. "The Jungle Child," a weird wandering from South America, with Dorothy Dalton and Mr. Hickman, occupies the shadowy borderland between plain punk play and babblingly bumptious burlesque. I think it's the latter. '""THE Country God Forgot," a Selig*■ Western deploying Tom Santschi, George Fawcett, Will Machin, Charles Gerrard and Mary Charleson in roles typical of a Western picture-play, is so simply and directly told, so human in its characterizations, and so full of physical suspense of the honest, old-fashioned type that it brings home to one the eternal verity of plain, hard tales of the out-of-doors. A story of simple folk in simple surroundings has a much easier time in being big and fine than a story about artificial people in artificial surroundings. Machin. Fawcett and Santschi play partners in a mining outfit. Machin is killed in a brawl and Santschi eventually marries his daughter, played by Mary Charleson. Gerrard, as a rascally government agent, lured the wife from the monotony of her life, and endeavors to escape with her and the government's money. He is captured, hanged — and the wife goes back to really love the husband who has always loved her. This, you see. is the simplest of oldfashioned recipes, but the actors, and Marshall Xeilan, who made his directorial departure from Selig here, ennoble it. There are some anachronisms of elapsing time ■ — certainly Santschi and Fawcett would have aged in the years that the little Charleson took to grow up — but apart from this and one or two other apparently unnecessary slights the visual tale is a gem of the soil. Vignette of a Blonde CHE was eighteen. Her piquant little face under its mop of yellow hair *^ smoothed about the ears with bandoline disclosed no emotion other than the most insistent interest in the young man who at that moment happened to be occupying her dreams. He was a dancer in a cabaret and genuinely worthless. She was a stenographer. She was not even a good one. Nothing had ever inspired her. The theory of effort rewarded had never occurred to her. Her work ended with the last "yours very truly" and began the next morning when she removed her gum from under her chair and began again to type badly. One night she went to a movie. Somehow they had never interested her before. She went because her "fellah" had to work. And there she saw a beautiful woman, loving and being loved. Something thrilled inside of her. She didn't know what it was. She only knew that she wanted to do as that woman was doing, to be what she was. to have people know her name, to watch for it in electric lights, to be interested in her minor habits. Ambition — that was what it was ! She did not know that her ambition was vain, that she never could obtain what she fancied in her dreams. But somehow she was happy — happier than she had ever been, and in the morning her machine was rattling like mad — and accurately too. "Look at little Smith," said the bill clerk. "I don't know what to make of it." Little Smith did though. She thought she was on the way to be a great actress. But she wasn't. She was on her way to be a good stenographer. (Which is rarer.) And she was happy. ^".v Carewe,