Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1919)

1 ! 1 ^fa^rflfl'' ^ ^ i 0\ven Talks About Mary As all ancient avenues led to Rome, so all film roads of reminiscence go back to Griffith and the Biograph of PickfordMoore days. YOU don't know what good nature really is until you have met Owen Moore. By good nature, I don't mean the ordinary garden variety that is capable of forgiving you with the sweetness of a Christian martyr and making you feel like less than the dust for the rest of the day. In short, I mean the jolly good fellowship that treats your blunder like a good joke which you both are in on. I mean the way Owen Moore acts when you break an engagement. It was one of those vague elusive engagements with no definite time or place and in a space where you can't get anyone on the phone to confirm it. At two o'clock, I doubted that any such engagement existed, at three I was sure I had never made it and along toward evening I began to wonder miserably if perhaps I hadn't said I'd be there after all. But in the morning, no one left me any chance for doubt. I was goaded to the divine fury of one who knows perfectly well that she is in the wrong. And with the inventive genius of persons in that position, I started in to frame excuses. Most of them were fairly plausible and all of them were good. They began with things like "An unavoidable accident prevented — " and "How could I possibly know that — " and all the other good old alibis for use in tight places. And then I finally did meet Owen !\Ioore and instead of the glowering sulking bulk of masculinity I expected, there was a perfectly cool, cheerful young man who beamed on me with the famous Moore smile and twinkled with the half humorous, half pensive Moore eyes. Still I was determined to take no chances. "It was most unfortunate about yesterday," I began stiffly, "but of course I didn't expect — " 53 By Alison Smith "Sure you didn't," he interrupted, grinning broader than ever. "Anyway it was all my fault." "Of course it was not your fault," I snapped, determined to have my fight out anyway. "Well, then, it was yours," he beamed, "but who cares anyway? While I was waiting for you I won two dollars at penny ante. Come on in and have some coffee." So over coffee and cigarettes and funny little cakes, we forgot about the feud in gossip about the screen. And as all roads lead back to Griffith, we went back to those first days of the old Biograph when a studio was an abandoned barn and lighting was left to the gods and the weather. The names that he recalled as belonging to those old times sounded like a page from "Who's Who" in the film world of to-day. There were Henry Walthall and Alice Joyce and Mack Sennett and Blanche Sweet and Fatty Arbuckle. And, of course, Mary Pickford. "My wife," he said simply, "from the very first showed promise of what moving picture acting might eventually become. We all saw it as well as Griffith, which was exceptional, for usually we couldn't see anything that Griffith saw. I remember those old fights about whether the public would ever stand for anything as long as the two-reel picture. And the row over the close-up! Everybody j'elled 'Where are their feet?' But Griffith won out on every count. He knows how to handle the close-up. So many directors do not. Sometimes I wonder if he wishes he had never invented it. "Griffith has always had a deep admiration for the French (Continued on page 122)