We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
The Screen
The month's motion pictures — a pag units can be found entertainment for our criiics praise and blame,
By Alison
'Hamlet," with Asta Nielsen in the title role, is beautiful and artistic, besides being one of the greatest novelties since films began.
T
HE screen month is exactly like a kaleid oscope. You remember those fascinatingtoys of colored glass
which used to hang on the Christmas tree and which were usually broken before New Year's? As you turned them before your eyes the colored glass made fantastic patterns that were never twice the same. The game lay in guessing what pattern would come next.
Now a month of reviewing motion pictures gives you the same impression of curious patterns, though some are even more fantastic and not all are altogether beautiful. But the suspense is the same. And this month it was justified. For the month just passed, as I write, has brought one of the strangest and most interesting designs into the kaleidoscope of the picture world.
"Hamlet."
It is a Danish film which comes right out without the slightest covness and calls itself "Hamlet." "Ah, Shakespeare," you say learnedly and watch for a title which announces, "John Barrymore in the leading role." But the first thing vou must do when vou see this
"A Prince There Was" shows Thomas Meighan as a reformed young hero again.
extraordinary picture is to get Shakespeare out of your head, not to mention John Barrymore. For the film is not the Shakespeare drama at all, and the title role is played — here is where the real shock comes — bv a woman, Asta Nielsen, a famous Copenhagen actress.
Perhaps you are prejudiced. I was when I first heard it. It seemed exactly like seeing Juliet played by a leading man. as in the merry but topsy-turvy old days of Queen Elizabeth. But after the opening of the first reel I saw I was wrong. The picture is beautiful and artistic, besides being one of the greatest novelties since films began.
It is based on the old Danish legend which existed before Shakespeare was born, and which has been made into a book called "The Mystery of Hamlet." by Edward P. Vining. This tale explains all Hamlet's strange conduct b}' the fact that he was really the daughter of a Danish queen. For reasons of state this queen mother brought her girl up as a boy. the Prince of Denmark. This was enough to make any child a melancholy Dane, but when you have her falling in love with Horatio and forced to hide her devotion you have more tragedy than Shakespeare ever heaped on the unfortunate prince in black velvet. For the rest, the story follows most of the Shakespeare version, but all the incidents are of course changed and colored by this strange reversal of its principal character's sex. Asta Nielsen, in the role of a woman Hamlet, makes an unforgetable picture. She has one of those intense, smoldering faces which could convince you of anything — that Lady Machetli was a man, for instance, if she cared to pursue this interpretation of Shakespeare farther. She is not, however, merely striking in appearance. .She imderstands acting to the last dramatic moment. Often you forget the fantastic scheme of the scenario in the interest you feel in her scenes. I am quite aware that the credit for much of this probably goes to her director, Sven Gade. Most perfect pieces of acting