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20
Picture s and Pichure $uer
"The
Os
Have It
The names of the four most
popular movie heroes of the
moment all end in O.
M
I
^Y
Ivor Novello, Britain's contribution to the oligarchy.
Honour where honour is due— Tony Moreno started the fashion years and years ago, before ever The Four Horsemen was thought of; before Ivor Novello, the composer, had given way to Ivor Novello, tlie film artist : before Rex Ingram had so much as heard the name of Ramon Samanicgos. Tony was the first big " O " . . . . and I shouldn't be too dreadfully surprised if Tony were to he the last as well. He slipped out for a wlnle, but now lie's hack again, the same old Tony with the same bright ryes, but a stronger Tony, a real actor. Still, there vould have been no glamour over the " O's " if JulioGallardo, the Sheik, had not danced his way on to the screen and into the fluttering hearts of the public. The O's were of no more importance than tile A's and the E's anil the KYZ's he fore Valentino happened along. Now they are indispensable. We can't do without them. They spell colour and passion and lure of the South : they
mean black eyes and black hair, white gleaming teeth and a Roman profile.
There has been a regular slump in golden-haired heroes since Rudy's star rose on the horizon, and blue eyes are very much a last year's model. But Rudy — though not his memory — dropped out of studio Hollywood while the fashion was still at its height, while audiences were still clamouring for dusky southern lovers and producers were seeking them throughout the length and breadth of America.
So Ramon Navarro, or Novarro, or Samanicgos — pick which name you like, they're all his — stepped into the gap which Rudy had left, and filled it as well as his young inexperience could.
A brilliant, exotic, whimsical young man, is Ramon. He was born in Mexico and trained, like Rudy, as a dancer, but acting was in his blood and he had' been a pantomimist ever since, as a tiny boy, he studied and imitated the faces of the people in his father's waiting-room. (Samanicgos the elder was a dentist !)
" He is a truly great actor in the making," Rex Ingram lately said of Novarro, " one who can hold his own with the best screen players of the day." And so came the contracts for The Prisoner of Zenda, Trifling Women, Where The Pavement Ends,
JANUARY 1924
and his biggest and bravest, Scaramouche — Scaramouche, swordsman, strolling player, revolutionary, who " was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad." And that is just Novarro to an — O !
Although a revplution in Mexico made him a pauper in a single night he never lost heart, but plunged into the movies via the dancing stage : and now at twenty-three he is drawing a fat cheque every week from Metro; gets the heaviest morning mail of all the younger film stars, and thinks everything in the garden's lovely The Baby of the " O's," and the lightesthearted.
D. W. Griffith is responsible for the discovery of the third " O " — or perhaps we should say the re-discovery — for Louis Mercanton, the French producer, first picked out his photograph from a hundred others and persuaded the handsome juvenile to play for him in The Call of the Blood. Other film engagements followed, but his reputa
Tony Moreno, the first of the O's.