Picture Play Magazine (Jan - Jun 1930)

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63 P ersona lities selves is intelligently examined here, with exists between their appearance on and off screen. Gebhart them play themselves, don't they ? Thinly veneered by the peculiarities of a role, you see the actor. Certain plays have drawing power, and the fan is not as rash an idol worshiper as formerly. Still the spell of a personality makes a Gilbert, a Bow, or a Garbo picture string the public into lines at the box office. Most roles may be catalogued as straight leading man or woman type. Which means that an interesting person is put in a set of imaginative adventures or problems. There is novelty in decoration, and happenings vary, but aren't most of them cut from the same basic pattern? Consider the majority of players. Give any two of the girls the same role ; both will play it with a technique similar, if not identical ; vet a Norma Shearer version would differ vastly from a Billie Dove or a Mary Brian version. You might say that one or the other excelled. While one might be more skillful than the others, the differences which at first observation appear to be solely in ability, generally can be traced to personality. Each endows the Photo by Bichee Dazzling hoyden or home girl? Clara Bow is catalogued as both. June Collyer's beauty, largely of coloring, is slighted by the screen. by Richee The vibrant buoyancy of Patsy Ruth Miller is too elusive for the camera to catch. role with attributes essentially her own, that indefinable magic called personality. As nearly as we can, we classify personality as vivacious, quiet, and so on ; but it is a puerile attempt to capture an intangibility in the reality of words. You can say that a frock is pink, but how can you express personality? And when people develop other selves, the problem becomes intricate. Greta Garbo is never recognized away from the studio, because when she leaves, she sheds that opalescent languor. She herself is drab looking in the plain clothes which she prefers, and wrapped in a meditative, sometimes moody silence. Her exotic screen self is a product, apparently, of her imaginative talents, of the atmospheric influence, and of a luminous quality with which the camera endows her, or brings out from her subconsciousness. Her work is, seemingly, the only thing in life of much importance to her; into it she pours a strangely sentient other self. Clara Bow is the object of conflicting public opinions. A hoyden, a crimson Bow with an audacious, reckless gayety, one hears her described, while another insists that she is a quiet homebody given to the pursuit of literature. At one time, when her new and thrilling success was rather gaudily worn, the Brooklyn bonfire very nearly approached in personal temperature her blazing shadow. Tapping to jazz rhythm, she danced, restlessly, furiously, through Hollywood, in gay harness and madcap capers with love.