Picture Play Magazine (Sep 1921 - Feb 1922)

in Review eant drab and gay in whose many every one, and which elicits from taunts and tributes. Smith may be traced to some mute, inglorious director. The only serious flaw in the picture is in the subtitles. Here the writer has mixed Shakespeare and his own ideas to a puzzling degree. You see Hamlet lifting her hands to heaven and exclaiming, "How long, dear Lord, must I live my mother's lie?" and in the next breath she is back to our familiar high-school quotations such as "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them as we may." The effect is disconcerting. Why, as Whistler might have said, drag in Shakespeare? "Doubling for Romeo." Into each life some rain must fall, but I hope I will never be obliged to live through a month without a Will Rogers picture. He is back again this month with a burlesque of Shakespeare— all the screen stars seem to be discovering the bard at the same moment. This, however, is quite another thing again from the Asta Neilsen triumph. It is the most amusing liberty that has ever been taken with the Elizabethan classics on or off the screen. Imagine, if you can, Will Rogers as Romeo. "Well, anyhow," he announced to an intei'viewer, "I can't play it any worse than it has been played before." There may have been worse Kouieos and louder Romeos, but certainly none have been funnier. He is a cowboy who sees the feud between the Montagues and Capulets as "the same old row betvv^een the cattlemen and the cave men." He wants to be a good lover — for a personal reason of his own — so he starts reading Romeo as the best authority. Of course he dreams himself in the role — with disastrous results. He also goes to a moving-picture studio to learn how to make love. This results in uproariously funny satire on the studio methods of filming romance. Biit he finally gets his girl Alma Tell, on the right, plays a pretty sob sister in ""The Iron Trail," which is almost as full of scenery as it is of plot. hy reverting to the good old cave-man methods. You will see that this variety of action gives him a chance to )e funny in every possible mood. And there is nothing furmier than Will Rogers on the screen, the stage, or the Ziegfeld roof. "A Prince Tiiere Was." Here is Thomas Meighan as the reformed young hero again. A George M. Cohan hero at that — the variety known to the wicked clubmen as a prince of a fellow. Eut like all such interesting and handsome roues he is brought back to the straight and narrow path by a slip of a girl. She writes books and dresses charmingly and reforms nice }-oung men all at the same time — a fatally difficult feat, but Mildred Harris gets away with it. The picture version naturally hasn't the glib repartee of the Cohan lines, but otherwise is a worthy successor to the stage comedy on Broadway. "AH for a Woman." In spite of its Bertha M. Clay title this is a foreign film with a period background. It is, in a sense, a supplement to "Fassion." For it takes up the story of the French Reign of Terror where "Passion" dropped it, and features many members of the first picture's cast. Instead of Du Barry, the principal character is Danton, who shares the spotlight with that other revolutionary leader, Robespierre. It is the conflict between the two guiding spirits of the Terror that makes up the action. Certainly it is not "all" for a woman — in fact the various beauties drifting in and out the plot are only the usual decorative accessories of a man with Danton's temperament. The struggle for power between the two men is the real theme. So we have the violent, impulsively human Danton and the suave, icy Robespierre as a striking study in Marion Davies plays a spoiled society darling in ^'Enchantment."