Picture Play Magazine (Jul - Dec 1929)

104 Continued from page 43 she found the greatest surcease from pain. Little did she know that those months of reciting lines would prove more valuable than all the picture experience she might have had during that time. Carol read plays, not from any devotion to duty, or any desire to shine among the culture-hungry, but simply because she enjoyed doing it. I did not know Carol at that time, but I knew many people who did, and I was always impressed by the way they spoke of her. When she was well enough to see a few visitors, no one ever thought of going over merely to cheer her up. An expedition to her house was always in the nature of a party. "Let's go over to Carol's and have some laughs," they would say. As a matter of fact, they didn't say "Carol" — they said "Jane." Her real name is Jane Peters, and many of her school friends still call her that. She would have gone on being plain Jane Peters, if studio executives hadn't objected to such a prosaic name for such a beautiful girl. "I just want to be happy," Carol told me one time when I pinned her down long enough to ask her a few questions about herself. "Just now I am crazy about the studio. I can't stay away from it. If they call me for four in the afternoon, I can hardly stay away at nine in the morning. I like to come over and see everybody, and feel that I am a part of what's going on. "I've always wanted to act. I went to dramatic school for three years A Fire-alarm Siren after I finished high school, and they couldn't hold classes too late for me. Then for a while I was crazy about dancing and swimming and yachting and riding horseback. "Now I can't imagine wanting to do anything but make pictures. Later on, maybe, it will be something else. Whatever it is, I'll do it. I always have a lot of fun. "When I finished 'High Voltage' I didn't have a day off, because they used me in making tests. They wanted to make tests of stage actors, and thought it would be easier if they had some one opposite them. I made a test with a chap who had been playing in 'Candida.' One night they handed me a copy of the play, and the next day I did a scene with him. It was all so new to me and such an old story with him, I almost burst out laughing. I thought the test was terrible, but the studio liked it, so it's all right with me. "I am going to do a picture with Robert Armstrong next. It is called 'For Two Cents,' and it's a newspaper story. But I don't play a sob sister. That's a distinction for me. I'm one of the few girls who hasn't played a sob sister this year." Carol might be called a siren type, if the word hadn't become confused with languid ladies, who recline on tiger skins and say "Yes" with alacrity. It's the fire-alarm sort of siren that suggests her personality. Legend has it that in her school days she was a prim little lady, until she noticed that she was being relegated to the background. Suddenly she bloomed into a flamboyant, hilarious, companionable sort, and she has never suffered from lack of attention since. Diane Ellis and Sally Eilers were schoolmates of hers, and they are still good friends. They are always hoping to work in the same studio. Carol has never found another studio playmate as congenial as Daphne Pollard, with whom she palled during her Sennett days. Daphne was always ready to join her in any effort to upset the dignity of the leading man. Carol is scrupulous about remembering engagements and being on time for them. She has never been known to complain of being tired. Her wardrobe is a model of smart sports wear for the young girl. But take it from Carol, she can always be counted on to make the wrong impression. When Joseph P. Kennedy, the big boss of Pathe, came out from New York every one in the studio was anxious to have him see Carol. They were eager to know that his judgment coincided with that of Edmund Goulding, and others, who had proclaimed her the greatest "find" of years. They hoped that he would wander out on a set just as Carol tore into a big dramatic scene, her lovely, sonorous voice making chills run up and down every spine. But instead she ran into him just as she was leaving the studio. Her hat had seemed tight, so she had given it a shove until it rested on the back of her head. Her blond hair was straggling in the breeze, her coat was half falling off her shoulders, and hands in pockets, she was slouching along whistling. Even at that the big boss thought her marvelous. Continued from page 94 Gerald Fielding. Well, they are visible in "Three Passions," and there is Alice Terry, too, though the picture is hardly one to make you consider these favorites in luck. Minus dialogue, it is an old-fashioned movie with a cumbersome story that isn't interesting. Its hero is Philip Wrexham, son of a rich factory owner. The young man has no sympathy for his father's business methods, so he becomes a lay brother in a religious order engaged in redeeming sinners in the slums. Lady Victoria, with whom he is tepidly in love, assures his father that she will go slumming too, and her allure will awaken Philip to the possibilities of love and bring about his return to the world. She does, and everything happens as it has in many another picture directed by far less important men than Rex Ingram. Tke Screen in ReViev? Mother Crucifies Herself. Mother love again has its innings, much in the same way that it has been dramatized before. This time it is called "Not Quite Decent," and we have the night-club hostess saving her chorus girl daughter from the talons of the very villain who amused himhimself with ma twenty years before. The situation is complicated by the daughter's ignorance of the' relationship and her disgust with ma's feigned drunkenness. Point is given the revelations by playing the scene in dialogue, though the long silence which prevails in the picture up to this point only emphasizes the oldfashioned story, and makes the sudden lapse into speech seem like an after-thought on the part of the director. Dialogue in "big" scenes is rendered more effective when it is led up to by speech in scenes of less importance. Be that as it may, this story begins when Linda leaves her home town with the chorus of a show and is seen by Mame Can field, the night-club queen, who overhears a chance word which identifies Linda as her daughter. Providentially they meet in the city, where Mame becomes aware of the peril which threatens Linda through the attentions of Al Bergdon. When things have gone just so far, Mame intervenes and shows up Bergdon before the girl's very eyes. In her supposedly drunken ramblings she proclaims her relationship, but when she succeeds in separating her daughter from Bergdon she laughs off her assumed motherhood. That's just her sacrifice. Mothers always sacrifice themselves on the screen.