Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1920)

Th e Shadow Ree. U. S. Pat. Off. A Review of the new pictures by Burns Mantle and Photoplay Magazine Editors cial stories, but its characters are interesting. Divorcing the wife and marrying the lingerie model, young husband discovers his mistake about the same time his first wife decides to do a little wild dressing on her own account. As a result of her exhibition, beginning at the ankles and the shoulders and extending thence north and south to the belt line, husband decides he has made a great mistake. And after he slips on a banana peel and chips a sliver or two of bone out of of his poor old head, and his first wife nurses him with the left hand while she beats up the interfering second wife with the right, he knows he is wrong. So he changes back. The settings and the costumes of the actors are, as previously noted, gorgeous. Thomas Meighan as le pauvre poisson who was taught to prefer the simple virtues of the home-broken wife, and to know that horn-rimmed spectacles are aces when worn for virtue's sake, frowned and suffered and looked hand | some in every scene. He is making surefooted progress toward stardom. Gloria Swanson and Bebe Daniels, besides being histrionically competent, were glorious camera subjects, wrapped and unwrapped in a million dollars' worth of lace and lingerie. The Sennetts and the Sunshine boys may outdo Mr. deMille as masters of the lower limb displays, but he completely distances them in the technique of the torso. William deMille furnished the text for "Why Change Your Wife?" /f t # HIS department -*• designed as a real service to '^hotopla-\ readers. Let it be your guide in picture entertain ment. It will save your time and money by giviri^ you the real worth of cur t It / / ires. "The Virgin of Stamboul" presents that tornado, that dynamo, Priscilla Dean, in a story not all ne'w or human, presenting however, a splendid version of the shimmy. interesting suddenness of a particularly active flea. William Grogan, being a plumber with a newly acquired fortune, decides to tour the world with a lad of ten whom he has adopted. On board ship William recognizes the ankles of a young lady who frequently had passed the windows of his basement shop. She, it transpires, is the sixth grade teacher of Grogan's young ward, and from the moment of their meeting with her their adventures begin. She is being puisued by a particularly irritating young man acting as agent for a dissolute fiance she is trying to lose. As her accepted protector, Grogan fights two or three men in Hongkong, several in Naples, a few in Gibraltar, a few more in Venice and Cairo, and finally knocks out a good half dozen in Singapore. His rescue work is quite the most active and the most thrilling of any recently seen and if ever a hero earned a heroine, James Kirkwood is entitled to the embraces of Anna Q. Nilsson in this picture. Kirkwood is a likable hero, and the radiation of his smile is as expansively ef« fective as ever. Miss Nilsson is excellent as the heroine and they are competently assisted by Ward Crane. Harry I Northrup and Master Ernest ButterI worth. THE SEA WOLF-Artcraft THE LUCK OF THE IRISH -Dwan-Realart There is an engaging frankness in "The Luck of the Irish," the Allan Dwan picture which lured James Kirkwood out of his retirement. It is a first class adventure story made from Harold McGrath's novel, and it hops over the world with the "The Sea Wolf" is another picture that is forced to hold its audience by the picturesque quality of its scenes rather than the plausible grip of its stor>'. It needs more than a title or two to project the materialistic philosophy Jack London wrote into his fine he-man story. It were better left out entirely, it seems to me, than used so sketchily. But as an exhibition of picturesque brutality George Melford has accomplished wonders with the picture. Big men, little men, strong men and weak are knocked down, knocked out, knocked over 65