Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Aug 1926)

le Screen in Review^ final train wreck is reached, the delinquency is almost entirely covered up. I think that Mr. Ncilan must he a sentimental Irishman who finds the world a whimsical place in which to live, and that, though Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who produced this picture, probably knew better all along, they decided to humor him, just for once, and let him have his own way. Ford Sterling lends a few humorous moments to the film. Filming a Prize Story "Mannequin" is the story that won the fifty-thousand-dollar prize offered by Liberty Magazine and Famous Players. The author is none other than Fannie Hurst, and as a clever artisan who knew what she was after when she submitted the story, she has crammed it full of every situation and every trick known to the literary and theatrical world. A young baby is stolen by her nurse and grows up believing her to be her own mother. At eighteen, she is a mannequin in a fashionable dressmaking establishment, where she meets a young, enthusiastic newspaper reporter. He gives her a little uplift, and she, in return, furnishes him with an idea for an editorial, the idea being that beautiful women, when they stoop to murder, should be punished as relentlessly as men. But, unfortunately, she herself kills a man who has forced his way into her home, and the old theory of practicing as you preach is held up for debate. The big kick in the story is when the lovely girl discovers that she is on trial before her own father. Nothing very new in this, you will admit, and yet it won fifty thousand dollars, which should inspire many of you to brush up a bit, though not too much, on plot and submit your ideas to the motion-picture companies. The director was James Cruze and the cast is a splendid one. Alice Joyce is the lovely mother. Dolores Costello is the distressed mannequin, Warner Baxter is the father, and Walter Pidgeon is the reporter. This picture will undoubtedly make a lot of money, as it has all the old, familiar, and well-loved situations, well handled and capably acted. Maybe fifty thousand dollars isn't so much money, after all. Somerset Maugham in Films "Infatuation" is the name given to what was once a stage play called "Caesar's Wife," by Somerset Maugham. It is a pleasant, slightly interesting, slow-moving picture starring beautiful Corinne Griffith. The story is based on the saying that "Caesar's wife must be above suspicion." The temptations that beset Miss Griffith as the lovely English wife of Sir Arthur Little are many but not varied. Malcolm MacGregor, the moon, music, and idleness do their best, but when her husband very nearly meets with death at the hands of his political enemies, she rises to the situation and meets it superbly. There is an undertone of Oriental cunning running seductively through the plot, for when an Egyptian smells a rose and talks in conundrums no good can come of it. Both Corinne Griffith and Percy Marmont enter into the spirit of Somerset Maugham's play with understanding and intelligence. They cut down their emotional acting until the action is so repressed as to make a careless glance seem a vital, dramatic moment. I do not think I have ever seen Percy Marmont as fine as he is in this. Miss Griffith has a tendency to pull down the corners of her mouth too much. It makes her seem severe. The Vanishing Cowboy "Womanhandled," starring Richard Dix, is a delightful light comedy showing Texas as it is to-day. Gregory la Cava, a, name unfamiliar to me, was the director, and he has filmed his story with cleverness and agility. A young and beautiful girl, Esther Ralston, tells a polo-playing young Easterner, Richard Dix, that she loves men from the great open spaces — big, rough, manly men — so there is nothing for Mr. Dix to do but to become rough and manly as quickly as possible. He finds that the West of fiction has vanished, and so, disgusted and disappointed, he is about to return to the East when