Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Jul 1929)

Advertising Section 103 The Spell of the Calliope Continued from page 24 This spirit of carnival hovers over the picture, touching" with gay, trailing fingers the tawdry brightness of the show boat itself, the spangles adorning the soiled dress that Julie, as the heroine of many melos wears, accounting for Magnolia's chameleon emotions. No role has aroused greater interest in recent months. Mary Philbin, Alice Day, and others were variously, and erroneously, rumored to play the quaint but spirited Magnolia. To the joy of many who felt that her dramatic talents had never been duly recognized, Laura La Plante was chosen by Harry Pollard, the director. Of many tested, Joseph Schildkraut was selected for the debonair, persuasive, but undependable Ravenal. Emily Fitzroy is Parthenio, Hawks, Otis Harlan Captain Andy Hawks, Jane La Verne Magnolia, as a child, Alma Rubens Julie. The cast includes Elise Bartlett, Jack MacDonald, Gertrude Howard, Ralph Yearsley, George Chesebro, Harry Holden, Max Asher, J. Thornton Baston, Jim Coleman, and others. Florenz Ziegfeld owns 'the talking rights, and refused to permit the film company to incorporate dialogue in r any sequence of the film. -U— ' Sound effects enhance the thrill \ and atmosphere. The storm adds its \dramatic undercurrent to those nights of dire calamity — when Magnolia, delirious, brings Kim into her uncertain world, and when Captain Andy dies. The swish of the water, stirred by the great wheel, reminds one always that this drama is occurring on a moving palace of make-believe, with the never-to-be-forgotten sound, the wheeze and scream of the old calliope. The story switches back and forth with incredible confusion to a mind bent on continuity. This has constituted the main difficulty of filming. In one paragraph references are made to three periods in the story. Separation and arrangement of material were less simple tasks than usual. However, no elaboration or material change was necessary, as happens when a scanty plot is padded. Costumes begin with the bustles and wide-shouldered dresses of 1885, with the hour-glass waist, and end with the "Gibson Girl's" flowing "princess," with wide, ruffled skirts. On the show boat, drama is twofold. The gaudy plays that they enact for the river-town audiences, and the drama of their own lives. The love scenes are doubly potent, because of the vigilance of Parthenia,' which keeps Magnolia and Ravenal apart except in the plays. There, before an unsuspecting audience, a sotto voce courtship is carried on. "My dear Miss Lucy — marry me." "Oh, please call me Miss Brown — when ?" So the Cotton Palace, with flags flying and bands blaring and calliope screeching, trundles up and down the river, moored now to the clay banks of an Illinois town, plying a while later from Baton Rouge to Vicksburg, taking Magnolia on kaleidoscopic journeys, of pageantry as fleeting, of destination as equivocal, as her own life seems. Partly, too, it is a saga of the river, of that turgid stream, bloated by torrents of rain, that tosses frail craft about on its churning waves. Thunder crashes, shafts of lightning illuminate a drama of nature's terrific force — logs riding the river's stormtossed crest, bits of household furniture from the flooded, inundated districts, mute driftwood from wrecks of homes. A fit accompaniment to the strong loves and hates that are the show boat's cargo. The thunderous basso to the love story, with its soprano high lights, is the river's majestic power. The scene shifts, then, to the Chicago of the early century. To the gayly lighted McVicker's Theater, to the era of the ornate Palmer House and the red plush and gilt of the Sherman House. The Ravenal fortunes veer with cataclysmic suddenness from the opulence of Magnolia's sealskin sacque, of a smart, yellow trap at the races, to furtive scurrying into cheap rooms, there to hibernate through gray, lethargic weeks. From sumptuous dinners to coffee and sinkers. Ravenal's linen grows frayed, but still he wears the Prince Albert coat and the silk hat and sports a boutonniere and swings the malacca cane. Except during those mysterious times when the cane disappears and in its stead he has a new bankroll with which to gamble. A popular ballad of the day has poignant meaning for Magnolia and Kim. "Father, dear father, come home with me now," is a refrain of increasing regularity in their lives. The picture ends with a denouement in Chicago, and does not carry one, as in the book, to a long-deferred curtain with the success of young Kim. 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