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Picture s and Picture $ve"
AUGUST 1924
Adolphe Menjou was always a competent screen player. But he gives Chaplin and " A Woman of Paris," the credit for making him what he is and setting a new fashion in heroes.
dolphe Menjou is the Philan\ derer de Luxe. He has philan" dered his way into the very heart of the movies, and the Menjou Mode is the mode of the moment. This peculiar cross between a hero and a villain is something quite new in an industry in which it is remarkably difficult to find anything new. A film such as Broadway After Dark — poor though it is in quality — marks the beginning of another epoch in film fashions which, it is safe to prophesy, will become as popular as the Motherlove era or the epoch of Great Open Spaces Where Men are Men.
jV/Ienjou, starring here for the first time, is allowed to fill the bill with a detailed study of a type as individual as any created by Valentino, William Hart or Barthelmess. He is the complete Man-About-Town and — this is the point — he is the hero, not the villain, of the story. This is not the first time that he has worn the white spats of a far from blameless life : but it is the first time they have covered the shins of anything but a villain.
The Menjou hero is not at all the type that the Nice Girl's Mother would like the Nice Girl to marry — but he is en
or Mm
J Left: As
y ) Due De Langeais "
(a medieval Man
Abotit-T oivn) in
" The Eternal
Flame"
tirely the type that the Nice Girl herself would choose. His past will not bear looking into. He keeps a telephone book in which are listed the Christian names of many ladies whose surnames he has forgotten. On slack evenings he calls them up. They write him love letters — which amuse him because they make such admirable paper boats which he can sail while he is having his bath. He doesn't know where all his money goes perhaps it's well. He women with canny exactitude, and plays on their foibles just
Left: The complete Mati'AboutTovm with Anna Q. Nilsson in " Broadway After Dark."
as skilfully as he plays on the saxophone.
But — and it's a big but — he has a sense of humour. He is quick and generous and sympathetic, and has no
Top: In
Clarence."
Above: With Edna
Purviance in " A
Woman of Paris."
delusions on the score of his own merit. He knows Broadway for just exactly what it is, and knows himself for what he has been, and wants, often enough, to be something quite different. He is that rather rare thing of the screen, the true gentleman.
This is the Menjou hero, which has sprung from the Menjou villain, and sprung, as it were, over night, in a sudden flash of an artist's perception. The artist? Chaplin.
It happened in this way. Nature in