We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
NOVEMBER 1924
shown in the movements of those tiny faltering feet as in her large blue eyes. Then, too, there is Mary Pick ford. Mary might truthfully be billed as " The girl with the most appealing legs in Filmdom." Who could resist the dimpled knee that appears above a wrinkled sock, the rounded toes of the little shoe that the name of Mary instinctively conjures up? Legs with personality these, that run and jump — hive you noticed the captivatingly kiddish way they twinkle over the ground? — and play childish pranks as though their owner were a feminine " Peter Pan " who had never really grown up, but just pretended to, occasionally, for propriety's sake.
f\i a totally different style, equally ^^ distinctive in their way, are the legs of Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin. Those of the former are straight and strong, capable of performing athletic feats and stunts that no other man on the screen can accomplish with quite the same air. Those of the latter — but what need is there to speak of Charlie Chaplin? Everybody knows that inimitable walk of his — the comedy he alone can express with the merest movement of a leg.
Two other people who can express a variety of, emotions with their legs are Harold Lloyd and Charles Ray. From the knee downwards there is a similarity about these two that is very noticeable in some of their films. See Harold Lloyd in Girl Shy and then
Picture s and PichjreO oer
Reading
downwards
Kathlyn
Williams,
Julia Faye, ■whose feet have figured in uih ''tinted close-ups as "doubles" for those of other stars.
Lon Chaney in a legless role; Harry Langden puts the shoe on the wrong foot in "Picking Peaches." His victim is
Above : If six feet equal two yarns in
long measure what do these six feet equal
in dollars'? The answer's in millions.
try and conjure up a vision of Ray in some of his old comedies — the gawky country boy type that made him famous. Both these actors have the same awkward, bashful way of standing in moments of embarassment, the same way of shifting uneasily from one foot to the other, the same characteristic walk, half hesitant, half defiant. In my opinion their legs are amongst the most expressive in Filmland.
[ on Chaney might be called the man with india-rubber legs. Usually they are twisted out of all recognition, as in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, when he played the part of " Quasimodo " the dwarf. Or he will make them disappear altogether by strapping them up behind him in some strange way known only to himself, as he did in the role of the cripple " Blizzard " in The Penalty. But that is a marvel of make-up rather than of dramatic talent. Lon Chaney does not act with his legs as Lillian, Mary and Douglas, Chaplin, Lloyd and Ray, and scores of other artistes of the camera.
To be an artiste of distinction it is necessary to have a power of expression that goes beyond mere facial contortions. Even one's legs must have personality !
E. E. Barrett.