Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Aug 1927)

72 The Screen in Review "The Heart Thief." "Broadway Nights." "The Climbers." nearly dies also, to make the father's revenge complete, but Mr. Wu dies instead, killed by Ralph's mother. The picture is slow-moving, all in accordance with Chinese dignity, and perhaps a little dull, though it has a sympathetic story. Miss Adoree acts beautifully, and is very quaint and Chinese In everything except her appearance. Lon Chaney, of course, portrays Mr. Wu so well that he might have been born in China. Louise Dresser is the English boy's mother, and Gertrude Olmsted his sister. Very Good, Eddie. There's no getting away from it, Eddie Cantor, in his second picture, "Special Delivery," takes his place among the foremost comedians of the screen. And now that he has won that place, it is hoped that he will keep it. He is supposed to be a mailman in this film, for the sake of the story — what there is of it — but Eddie is really himself. His expression throughout is that of a nervous, surprised boy who, as some one has said, looks as if he has just discovered the impossibility of selling enough blueing to get a Shetland pony. "Special Delivery"' is a picture of gags galore. Plot means less and less in present-day comedies, and in this one the story is used only to account for Eddie's uniform. True. William Powell is present to put over villainy, and Jobyna Ralston's curls are also in the cast, to furnish love interest, but it is Eddie's antics that furnish the entertainment. His Black Bottom is the funniest ever seen, and the episode in which a mother leaves her baby with him, while she gets a twenty-dollar bill changed to pa}" two cents due on a letter, is great. Harry Earles, the remarkable midget who played in "The Unholy Three," is the infant in the case, and It takes sharp eyes to detect that he isn't a real baby. By all means, see "Special Delivery" and join the Cantor cult. A Battling Butler. "Is Zat So?" on the stage was, literally, a "howling" success. There are tremendous comic possibilities, of course, in the situation of a down-and-out prize fighter and his manager acting as butler and second man in a Fifth Avenue mansion. The screen version of the play confines itself to the slapstick value of their predicament, and the result is a custard-pie edition quite without the rollicking character studies presented on the stage. Many of the play's glib lines have, of course, been lost also, though probably some of them were used as the basis for the funniest of the subtitles. Surprisingly enough, the championship bout, which should have been the great dramatic climax of the film, is shown, for the most part, as the two girls of the story hear it over the radio. This, perhaps, is more novel than showing a close-up of the fight itself, but it will probably prove disappointing to ring fans. George O'Brien, as the fighter, is good, though almost overshadowed by Edmund Lowe in the role of his manager. Kathryn Perry is pretty, as usual, in a role that calls for little else but prettiness, and the film introduces an apparent newcomer named Dione Ellis, who is cute and blonde and altogether lovely. The picture as a whole is funny in slapstick fashion, but far from hilarious. Cut-ups in Khaki. Karl Dane and George K. Arthur are teamed in "Rookies" with such excellent results that one hopes the} will be given a chance to do it again. The picture is a military farce, but instead of being just another war comedy, it has for its background a citizens' military training camp. Of plot there is little, but of pranks there are many. Arthur is Greg Lee, a cabaret dancer, who incurs the enmity of Sergeant Diggs, of the regular arm}-. When Greg is arrested for a minor offense, and is about to be sentenced to thirty days, he is sent to a military training camp instead. It is the Sergeant's self-appointed job to discipline the dancer in his own heavy-handed way. There's not much else to the story, except that there's a girl. Marceline Day. What really counts is the antagonism of the two men and the ingenious means they devise to circumvent each other.