Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Aug 1926)

68 'Joanna. " The Screen in Review Lois Wilson is Lady Cwoulolyn, and Ernest Lawford has a small part as the Earl. The scenes taken in Ireland are really beautiful, and on these the picture rests. Philanthropic Millionaires. "Joanna," a First National Picture, with Dorothy Mackaill. is a tinsel drama defending American womanhood. Two millionaires get into an amiable argument concerning the morals of the American girl, and one of the dear old fellows, to prove his point, bets a million dollars that the girls nowadays are as good as they ever were. They decide to test this theory, and thrust a poor shopgirl into a luxurious life by suddenly giving her a million, to use as she will, the idea, of course, being that once having owned a million, she, when it is spent, will undertake a life of crime rather than go back to poverty. Of course, she could have fooled them all by safely investing her money and living on the income, but no one seems to have thought of that. The picture is full of gay midnight parties, terribly done, and of bad, bad rich men who turn out to be only fooling after all. Lovely Dorothy Mackaill, with her hair cut short, proves to me that she is a comedienne of the first order. Nothing she does seemimprobable, from spending a million to regretting it. George Fawcett, he with the well-managed eyebrows, is the quaint old millionaire. Dolores del Rio is an effective decoration newly arrived from South America. The picture was badly directed by Edwin Carewe. Engaging Crooks. "Seven Sinners," a Warner Brothers picture, gets off to a splendid start only to be slowed down by a rather inevitable grinding of the camera. Marie Prevost and her partner in crime, John Patrick, an exceedingly handsome young man, plan to rob a large country house. There thev run into Clive Brook, as Jerry Winters, who seems to belong there but who turns out to be only another gentleman burglar. Two more join the ranks, and finally a third, and they are all locked up in the house together, with the burglar alarms set on the windows and a policeman just outside. The comedy in this picture is delightful until it suffers from repetition. But even at that, the film is a well-directed and nicely staged entertainment. There can never be too many Jimmy Valentines in pictures for me. And Some More Crooks. Here, if we are to believe all we read, is a picture both written and directed by William de Mille. It is '"The Splendid Crime," starring Bebe Daniels, and while it is not unusually exciting, nor unusually clever, it is nicely knit and worth seeing. It affords principally an opportunity for Miss Daniels to show just how a good girl acts and then just how a bad one suffers. Or rather, it is the other way round, for she gets all the badness over with in the early part of the picture, and virtue sets in immediately. In fact, she meets the young man who is afterward to be the object of her affections while she is burgling at midnight, and the reform sets in right then and. there. The young man is Neil Hamilton, the same who played in D. W. Griffith's "America" (first installment). Both he and Miss Daniels do as well with their parts as even Mr. de Mille could expect. As the plot winds up, it weakens, and the finish is a little too preposterous to be swallowed by even the kindest of audiences. However, crook plays can't be entirely plausible and still keep the hero and heroine out of jail, so if you want to see two extremely handsome young people acting very well indeed,