Pictures and the Picturegoer (Jan-Dec 1925)

FEBRUARY 1925 Picture s and Picture pver 11 master stroke in sending both hero ami heroine well on the way to perdition, and snatching them both, like brands from the burning, at the last minute. And their reasons for thus sinking into the depths are for the most part ibsurdly trivial. Father refuses to send next quarter's allowance — see tinresult in the Stoll picture Not For Sale; the woman in the ease has the taste to refuse to marry our hero — down into the depths he. goes. Comebody lays an obviously false *^ accusation of theft at his door, and instead of calling the accuser a liar to his face and facing the thing like a man of spirit, he allows those convenient " depths " to swallow him up, until everybody else in the film has seen through what the audience found as clear as daylight at the very beginning, and he returns without a blemish on his character. In Christine of the Hungry Heart, " Christine's " first husband, played by Warner Baxter, owes his downfall to " wine, women and song." He finally arrives at the ignominy of a prison hospital, where, judging by his appearance when he escapes, shaving is considered an unnecessary luxury. His erstwhile wife, herself somewhat of a wanderer, finds him in a church where he has gone for shelter, and takes him up into the mountains just in time to provide us with the inevitable deathbed scene, without which no film can be judged complete. The most thorough down and out I have ever seen was played by Percy Marmont in the Vitagraph film The Clean Heart. The mental tortures that man suffered — for no very obvious reason — exceeded in wildness those of any other film hero it has ever been my misfortune to watch. It needed the death of one perfectly good tramp, and the maiming of a perfectly nice girl, to restore the glimmerings of commonsense to his weak and bemused mind. Personally I think it would have been all to the good if they'd taken him out and drowned him when quite young — but then, of course, there would have been no firm. But if my sympathies are not with the hero in his distresses, I have nothing hut pleasant things to ->ay of the nal honest-to-goodness, profea sional down and out. Give mc a weather-hardened tramp, with his toes hanging out of his hoots, a jovial rover sleeping in barns and haystacks. ami plundering hen roosts by nighl and mine eyes will delight in the si^ht of him. A man like Otis I Lilian m the afore-mentioned film, The Clean Hani — plump, jolly and carefree, despite the dirt and rags — is worth half-a-dozen of those milk and water young men who never know their own mind from one minute to another and fluctuate until the end of the picture between clean sheets and a feather bed in Mayfair and a doss house down in. Limehouse A fine representative group of movie dozen and outs in " The Lighthouse by the Sea" Victor McLaglen and Hugh E. Wright had a pretty good time in A Sailor Tramp, even though poor Hugh pegged out at the end.. There's something about a real tramp to win one's admiration. No last minute death-bed repentance for him ; no simpering heroine kneeling by his side witl tears of glycerine grief making channels through the grease paint — that's a weakness in which he would scorn to indulge. He dies as he lives, the movie tramp, and he's the only down and out for me. Percy Marmont and Otis Harlan on the tramp in " The Clean Heart." E. Elizabeth Barrett.