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Concerning Invisible Stars
In which the reviewer calls for a re-distribution of the credit for the success of some recent releases.
By Herbert Howe
THE term "star" originally was a citation for theatrical merit. But like the Croix de Guerre, it now may be obtained without authority. It is bestowed usually upon the entertainer who appears before our eyes, whereas it should be awarded as liberally to the writer, director, and designer of sets.
After visiting studios for some time I have concluded that the player is the only person on the "set" who never works. He lounges in coma while electricians, camera men, and directors are preparing the scene. At the call of the megaphone he strolls across the camera line and goes through motions dictated by the director. I refer to ordinary players, including numerous stars. There are stars— a few —
who can build on the director's ideas and even create a character from the script.
But it is the invisible star who has given us the finest work during the first month of 1920. I sing not of Pickfords and Chaplins and Harts, but of Dwans, Tourneurs, Irving J. Martins, Lillian Duceys, and Charles Kysons — all invisible stars.
The most luminous of these is Allan Dwan, creator of "The Luck of the Irish." Mr. Dwan has produced many good pictures in the past, but a new Dwan is revealed through this picture — a master of wit and whimsey as well as of grandiose spectacle. "The Luck of the Irish" is the best 1920 picture I have seen and is unsurpassed in popular entertainment value by any I viewed in 1919.
The plot, strung on a pearl necklace — which might have been borrowed from De Maupassant for the occasion— is fragile paste. The producer has given it the semblance of reality, burnished it with wit and poetry, and restudded it with gems of human interest. Lillian Ducey has written subtitles as entertaining as the pictures they interpret.
The acting is so harmoniously good that again credit
The hero of Allan Dwan's latest picture is an Irish plumber.
must go to the star behind the megaphone. James Kirkwood returns to view, after several years of directing, a fit nominee for stardom. Excellent, too. is the inexperienced boy actor, whose lady friend remarks, "I didn't know little boys smoked cigarettes ;" to which the swaggering kid replies, "I don't, except when I'm out of cigars." Anna O. Nilsson never came so close to projecting genuine feeling. Even such a bit as the boardine-house vamp is memorable as played by Lois Wood
The hero of the comedy-drama is an Irish plumber. In a Griffith play he might be dubbed Knight of the Strong Arm and Simple Heart. Through the narrow window of his basement you see many feet scurrying along the streets of New York. The plumber, being a romantic chap, conceives a pedal romance. The pair which gives him the cardiac kick has cuban heels and smooth hose. You follow the feet to a boarding house and meet the owner. Aboard a transatlantic steamer the plumber meets her and enters her drama. He has inherited twenty-eight thousand, seven hundred and fifty-six dollars and thirty-one cents. She is fleeing from a lizardous gentleman with tar-roofed head, a villain so passionately evil that he follows her half