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The Shadow
A Review of the 7<[ew Photoplays
By
Julian Johnson
Charles Eldridge and Fair
and Constance Binney, in
"Sporting Life."
YOUR great-grandfather, if he were alive, could tell you about the huge star-shower in 1833, or thereabouts. You might counter by calling his attention to the autumn star-shower of 19 18, in the celluloid firmament. This sudden irruption of new planets has no parallel since the early days of motion pictures. Stars have always occurred singly; but the members of the new galaxy have been in training for solo honors a long time, generally speaking, and their debuts happened to be almost simultaneous.
First of the new constellation came Lila Lee, Paramount's made-to-order favorite. Lila Lee was a daring experiment, a sheer producer's gamble, for no man who ever lived has been able to forecast the public's idols, its next styles, its next authors or its next elections. In addition to gambling on the public, Paramount gambled on Lila Lee herself. Remember, they were working with no adroit movie actress. This shy, sloe-eyed child was only of the vaudevilles. But . . . Lila Lee became a real though not sensational success on her first picture. I'll bet Lasky, then, felt like the first-time father in the dawning moments of fatherhood; wouldn't have taken a million dollars for this one, and wouldn't have given a cent for another. The chief charm of the little Lee is that she is something different. She approximates n o reigning favorite. She gives you the impression of a new, odd, velvet
Mae Marsh, in two characterizations in "Hidden Fires. '
petalled blossom found in a garden with all of whose plants you had long thought yourself familiar. She has a repose which is not altogether placidity, and, I suspect, some emotional depths which none of her work has revealed. Her first story, "The Cruise of the Make-Believe," was a mild little fantasy about a poor little girl who rigs up a "boat" in her tenement back-yard, and, stepping over its two-by-six gunwale, sends her imagination roving over the seven seas. Not much to praise, but nothing to condemn, for it had whimsicality and a fine production.
Divested of his falsetto squeak and his weird conversation, and adorned instead with an almost impossible story, Fred Stone assaults the photoplay as a man wearing a ball
and chain would assault a rampart. Old tricks of voice and demeanor, not story, have made Fred Stone one of the favorite comedians of the whole English stage, and when he has to sacrifice those odds and ends for a yarn, the yarn ought to be shock-proof. It must be admitted that Frances Marion had a good idea in the adventures of Chuck McCarthy, the steel-worker who would a movie hero be — but what happened to it? The same thing, we fear, that has happened to many another literary suit of clothes designed for a great person: it was pulled here, and pinned there, and cut yonder, and spliced on that place until it retained as much style as a farm hand's overalls. We don't know that that's what happened, but may
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