Pictures and the Picturegoer (Jan-Dec 1924)

10 h'/cr\jres anu r/crurepuer NOVEMBER 1924 Lubitsch came. He saw Marie Prevost and watched her work. Then he went straight out and said there were not many great actresses in America, but that little Marie Prevost was right at the top of the list. When Marie flashes on to a screen I always sit up and heave a sigh of relief. For then I know that things will begin to move — violently. Things always do move with Marie Prevost. The slowest film speeds up at her coming. That is her charm, her peculiar quality of stimulation ; her " aliveness," which communicates life to everyone who watches her. Marie is a real child of nature. Whatever part she may be playing at the moment, she plays it with her whole self, keeping nothing back of her personality, subduing none of it. Marie is Marie, first and foremost. A perverse, troubling little person, full of moods and desires, petulant, flattering, and always brimful of life. One instant she will be coaxing, another will find her defiant. But whatever is the mood of the moment, the screen will reflect it with perfect frankness. That is why Marie is such a pleasure to watch after the well-schooled, artificial stars whom we see day after day. Perhaps her early life and training had a more direct bearing on Marie's film technique than is generally acknowledged. She has no place in her life for the artificial lights, the silks and velvets of luxurious villainy, which set out the beauty of so many stars in their brightest lustre. Marie is an outof-doors girl. Her father was a famous athlete, and little Marie, long before her age could boast of two figures, used to wrap up in furs and tam-o'-shanter and tramp out with him into the Canadian snows, where she would sport a toboggan and pair of Above : Marie in horn-rims, an unusual state of affairs. skis with the best man of them all. She learnt very early to be a great little rider, and nothing, on four legs can worry her at all. But it was through the water, so to speak, that she first came to the screen. For Marie Prevost, in the beginning, was a bathing beauty. Mack Sennett saw her one day when she was out with a movie friend of hers, and was struck by hei face and fine carriage, her impudence and freshness. He gave her a test and found to his joy that not only was this girl a beauty but a firstclass swimmer. Enough for Mack. He prides himself on never letting a potential star slip through his fingers. Marie was engaged on the spot. Of all the famous Sennett bathing girls, Marie Prevost is the most famous. Gloria Swanson's career there was dazzling but brief. Phyllis Haver ran her a dose second. But Marie led the Sennett ranks through a long series of pictures, played in the water and out of it, in the crowd and out of it, and finally graduated to star parts with Sennett in his five and sixreel comedies. As the heroine in A Small Town Idol she made her first big hit, and she followed it up with Douvi on the Farm, in which she and her friend Louise Fazenda shared honours. Dut Marie deserted the waves after a time, and started work on independent productions. A natural ambition, but, to my mind, a mistake, which it has taken a long while and a good deal of luck to put right. For Marie needs clever handling, and careful casting when it comes to serious dramatic roles ! She is not every producer's star That very spontaneity and vivid life which gives power to her work, can also be a source of very great weakness. It is apt to grow unruly, to tear the web of a plot. Marie is too natural when she takes the matter into her own masterful little hands. She has only a slight sense of pictorial values, and no sense at all of gravity. What else could you expect from a comedy star with French-Irish ancestry? She brings to the screen a heritage of pluck and pure nature, which it is the pro Below : She is an enthusiastic gardener.