Picture Play Magazine (Jan - Jun 1930)

Their Dual Personalities 65 Evelyn Brent's roles have devel oped her off-screen personality. Photo by of a nimble mind, a scintillant, bantering humor, vivid coloring, and an indefinable individuality. Contrasting her youth, this sophisticated alertness is her main charm, but a complete washout on the screen. June Collyer's frail beauty, largely of coloring, is missing. With her cultivated composure and impersonal coolness, she is as flexible as a wood carving. Perhaps it is because she is not yet fluent in expression; partly, too, it is caused by her remembrance, whether deliberate or subconscious, that she is playing a lady, and must act accordingly. Off screen, she doesn't have to recall the fact, so she is charming in a lightly dignified manner. Overemphasis, in publicity, of her breeding is to be blamed for the patrician pose in her work. Until recently Lois Moran's shadow seemed colorless, though she herself displayed varied cultural interests and an average girl's animated enthusiasms. A director once diagnosed her for me as being too coldly mental, with too fiercely inquisitive and calculating an intellect. This determination to grasp knowledge is a detriment ; the camera coolly ignores the mind, and probes for genuine feeling and emotional response. That is why you forget the technical actors and remember a tensely ecstatic or hysterical scene of some little, unskilled girl who is a sieve for more elemental feeling. You even call it art! Though she gains in power of personality on the screen, Baclanova suffers in that no black-and-white medium can do justice to her coloring, that startling, pale-gold-and-white beauty illuminated by electric, blue eyes. The screen Nick Stuart — a hustling, gogetter kid — leans against his real self, reticent, numb in an isolation of Roumanian Mary Brian is much more animated in pictures than in real life. Photo by Richee William Bakewell is boisterous in every waking moment. The breathless nervousness of Dolores Costello heightens her fragile screen beauty. heritage, the inability as yet to think or speak or feel except in essentials. But I think that from his shadows Nick gets much of the strength which in his work takes the form of bustling activity. Though equally awkward at adaptation, Nils Asther is himself any way you look at him, because usually he is cast as a polished, suave gentleman, with a fluent, easy charm and a touch of aloofness. Except for initial successes, no films have caught the quaint wistfulness of Mary Philbin, who belongs in a frescoed frame, the elusive, elfin appeal of Betty Bronson, or May McAvoy's whimsicality. Beneath a practical and sensible manner, May has hidden Erin's tear-misted gladness ; it would fluff up like the April sun with the least encouragement and appreciation. Sam Hardy is far more interesting, in a broad, hearty way, than his hard-boiled characterizations, which allow him, too, a certain latitude. His clothes are startling ; his humor is ready. He has only to stand still and look at a mob, and they begin to laugh, though he hasn't got that kind of face, really. A favorite in Hollywood, he must address crowds often. Every sentence is halted by a round of cheers. I enjoy the applause of Sam's turn very much ; some day I hope to hear him speak. Still more, I should like to see the real Sam in a picture. [Cont. on page 108]