Picture Play Magazine (Sep 1919 - Feb 1920)

"East Side, West Side, All Around the Town" 29 Boweryites scurrying from the would have sent i house. Next door is the Thalia Theater, the home of Italian drama in New York. The Thalia occasionally runs an Italian war picture. Its patrons are never tired of looking at what their kinsfolk did at the Piave. The Atlantic Garden prides itself on speaking nothing but English and this is remarkable on the East Side where Americans speak ninety-nine languages and talk American in ninety-nine different ways. Its posters are in English and so are all the subtitles. From Canal Street, we walked down to Chatham Square, where we found Chinatown's own theater. Aunt Elizabeth was disappointed to find none of Fourteenth Street's horrors of the "hell pits of Chinatown."' Poor old Chinatown has been reformed by the great moral sight-seeing wagon which visits it with the faithfulness of a prim maiden aunt. Every time there is a chance of a lively Tong war, the sight-seeing wagon drives up, laden with conscientious tourists and spoils all the fun. But the Chatham Square Theater, darkened by the elevated road and surrounded by the Orient, looks picturesque enough. Some of the houses near it might furnish settings for another D. W. Griffith Limehouse story, or another "Miracle Man." For here are boarding houses for Chinese seamen, tea parlors, and an engaging shop called the Long Life Noodle Company, where are manufactured noodles so hale and hearty that they defy the ravages of age. It was there that we saw Sessue Hayakawa. Although he is a "Jap" boy, he is the star of stars in Chinatown. Otherwise it is hard to tell what these Children were eating candied apples on spiced sticks. New York Chinamen like in the way of entertainment. They like Pearl White. They like George Walsh. And they like William Desmond. That they also like that most effete and Occidental actress, Elsie Ferguson, proves that you never can tell. "What do you suppose a Chinaman thinks about at a moving-picture show?" asked Aunt Elizabeth as she scrutinized the face of a merchant who was sitting near us. "I give up," I replied. On Rivington Street, in the Ghetto, we found films served Kosher style. Here we discovered the interpreter. The interpreter is a solemn, scholarly Jewish person. He stands on the side of the stage, in the dark, and translates the subtitles in Yiddish^ All this is for the benefit of the old people. The children can read the subtitles loudly and glibly. "Out home at the Bijou Dream," commented Aunt Elizabeth, "we have an interpreter, too. He is old man Martin. His wife is near-sighted and deaf. You can hear him shouting all over the theater." Even the interpreter is dying out fast. The Goldwyn Pictures Corporation has its own translator whose business it is to furnish synopses in all the languages of the East Side. These are hung in the lobby so that, after the show, father and mother go out and see what it has all been about. But alas for tradition ! The East Side is not morbid. A salesman whose territory centers in Grand Street told me that "Nellie the Poor Working Girl" drew no tears there. ■ That thrillers left them cold. That "stylish, well-dressed heroines" were immensely popular. That the audiences weren't at all interested in the perils of a big city. That they much preferred the perils of smart society. We found but one picture that pointed a moral for the working girl. It was received with a grain of salt. When the villain employer lured the heroine into his apartment, when he began upsetting furniture, knocking over statuary, and disarranging tigerskin rugs, two cheerful factory girls laughed derisively. "How do they get that way !" they exclaimed. The only person who took the plot seriously was a staid father who had just dropped in on his way home. His arms were filled with bundles that smelled appetizingly of herring and coffee. It pained and frightened him to see such a lovely young lady, no older than his Rosie, being treated so. He was alone in his sympathy. Didn't the girls know that the hero always comes to the rescue? Aunt Elizabeth was anxious to visit Rose Gordon's Venetian Gardens, situated where Park Row meets the Bowery. She wanted to know who Rose Gordon was. "She was probably as famous in her way as Edwin Booth," she said. In a theater on Rivington Street ire The girl who sold discovered the interpreter.