Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1918)

The Shadow Stage 69 Abramson's "Ashes of Love" is not only unclean, but uninteresting. Peggy Hopkins, a pretty New York girl, shows a startling flash of comique talent, almost suggesting the Mable Normand of other days, in her premier solo picturette, "Hick Manhattan," an expression of James Montgomery Flagg's scenario gifts. Louis Joseph Vance, who has always batted a perfect score when it came to fighting with producers about the film rights to his stories, writes his first original screen tale in "The Inn of the Blue Moon," and the star is Doris Kenyon. The best part of the story is that it is a light and real romance — not much of a story after all, but refresh-* ing and diverting in these days of war. Miss Kenyon is charming in her youthful enthusiasm. Her part calls for no especial "acting." Dorothy Gish has been long a star in all but the name. And now she has the name. The piece is "The Hun Within," and it's an energetic, well-taken, well-acted story of internal alien propaganda — and worse. The first half is realistic, vivid, believeable; the last trails off into mere motion picture. But through it all runs a great human characterization played as only George Fawcett could play it. The littlest Gish is her usual darting, thrush-like self, and very convincing, too. SPORTING LIFE — Maurice Tourneur Would an obvious old Drury Lane melodrama move you to a point where you hissed the silk-hatted villain, applauded every entrance of the poor^and-persecuted heroine and whistled and yelled for the noble hero? Hardly, theoretically speaking. Yet that's just what a first-night audience did in New York, as the premier unrolling of this picture in September, and I imagine the sophisticated have repeated those unaccustomed demonstrations in many another place. I'm going to give Maurice Tourneur a film name and I hope it sticks, for it is a complete description of his brilliant talent: he is the David Belasco of the screen. Belasco is a man who can so glorify, embroider and adorn a tawdry and primitive story that the result confounds even the intellectually elect. It seems to me that Belasco's favorite story — in spite of certain comedies and such wholly legitimate stars as David Warfield — is just that sort of contraption. He can trick it out, transfigure it, play wizard with it — and have his quiet little laugh when the rapturous call it a masterpiece. In every way that a camera master could devise, Tourneur has Belascoed "Sporting Life." He has dim depths of real night in his evening exteriors that have never been equalled in film plays. A real London fog settles down upon his mimic streets. He revives his old "cross section of a house" device on a vast three-story scale, at a critical point. He drives his rattling old Ford drammer with the hurricane speed and enthusiasm of one chauffing a theatric Rolls-Royce from the factory of Pinero. He builds an almost breathless suspense, and most important of all, from the lay figures of good and evil he creates human beings. The velvet-cheeked Binney sisters, Fair and Constance, are such delicious youngsters in this that we hope he'll let us see them again. Willette Kershaw is an ultra villainess. Warner Richmond and Charles Eldridge are best of the men. "Sporting Life" is the best melodrama since "The Lone Wolf." THE BELLS — Pathe What "The Music Master" is to Warfield this old story of the murdered Polish Jew was to the late Sir Henry Irving. It was inevitable that, sooner or later, the drama should become a scenario; and it is fortunate that Frank Keenan should play it, for no man in range of the Klieges i^ better fitted for the part. On a winter night, while the In "The Temple of Dusk" Sessue Hayakawa finds a new element. His acting and the Oriental glamor give this tale reality. "Fatty" Arbuckle calls his latest picture "The Sheriff.' ^™ . r &&~ . * ' 'j&m wN mmbS^M Evelyn Greeley and Carlyle Blackwell in "The Road to France,' a story of the shipbuilding.