Pictures and the Picturegoer (Jan-Dec 1925)

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42 Pictures and Pichuretyoer JANUARY 1925 The Old Order Cta And the old conventional screen characters are so well dis guised that it's hard to tell t'other from which. In the early infancy of the screen, films were very different things to the pictures of to-day. There was a crude simplicity about them that contrasts vividly with, the constant striving after subtlety and originality of the modern director. Characters were less complex. The hero was just a hero, and easilv recognisable as such. Before the first sub-title informed theaud'>nc?nf his identity a hundi £ ' or more vociferous voices had cheered his slick-haired presence on the screen. He was the handsome, open-faced ■Below « The Jazzy heroine — Colleen Moore young man who loved the heroine through thick and thin. Usually some evil-natured enemy took away his character in the first reel and nobody believed in him but his trustful young sweetheart (and, of course, the audience !) But in the last reel he always got it back again, none the worse for its tem > When comedies were comedies and nothing else but. Chaplin's first effort. Do you remember it? porary absence, and true love received the customary reward. He had a way, this hero, of always doing the right thing. Naughty vampires tried their wicked wiles upon him, and found him impervious to their over-blatant charms. Villains waited for him, with gangs of " toughs," and attacked him in lonely places. But dear Horace would lay half a dozen of them out in the first round, without so much as quivering an eyelid. Fashions in films may alter but screen villains like Stuart Holmes (jo on for ever. The heroine smiled prettily at her honest hero-lover. (Gladys Hulette and Johnnie ' Walker). Truly a wonderful man ! The villain, too possessed the same directness of character. From the moment he first appeared on the screen, twirling a sinister moustache and ogling the heroine in a way that boded no good to the poor girl, there was no stopping the wickedness of that man. He blackened the hero's spotless reputation, he kidnapped the heroine, lie tied innocent people who never did him any harm to the railroad track, he foreclosed on .the mortgage and turned whole families out into the snow, he blew up things with dynamite, he bullied little children and ill-treated dumb animals, and, in fact, committed every crime known to mankind. """The heroine herself was a gentle little thing who smiled prettily at her honest hero lover, looked horrified when the villain breathed down her neck, anl generally behaved as a nicely brought up girl should. The vamp, who writhed and undulated and narrowed her eyes in the approved vampire style, spent her time smoking cigarettes and fascinating men. These four were the principal characters in any and every movie, and as distinguishable, one from the other as black is from white. But times have changed and films with them. It is no longer quite so easy to tell hero and villain, heroine and villainess apart, and black and white merge so cunningly into one another that it is difficult to find the meeting point. All this is very con