Screenland (Oct 1923-Mar 1924)

New. SCREENPLAYS HE screen is evincing decided signs of growing up. Charlie Chaplin's A Woman of Paris was a very determined growing pain. Now Thomas H. Ince's adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie comes pretty near smashing the cinema go-cart. If the screenplay keeps on it will be walking all by itself before long. she finds love in the heart of an Irish stoker. Screen Anna Christie a Faithful Version M, A, The Screen Is Grouing Up ^nna Christie takes its place beside A Woman of Paris as one of the two interesting silverscreen events of the current celluloid year. Like the Chaplin effort, it goes beyond the conventional adolescent borders of the film. O'Neill is our leading native playwright. He has youth and courage, along with a fine fearlessness in experimenting with footlight technique. Two of his best ilays, The Hairy Ape and The Emperor Jones, are decided examples of this striving for a fresher stage story-telling. Anna Christie is constructed more in the conventional style of the speakies but it has all the O'Neill ruggedness and relentlessness. Broken in health and spirit, a girl comes from a middle Western city to seek her father, now drifted to the low estate of barge captain. She has slipped even to being a derelict of the streets, he has been a careless adventurer of the seven seas. But, once on the barge, dirty and sordid as it is, the girl finds a moral regeneration in the tang of the sea. And ultimately QThe Month's Best Screenplay {t,Anna Christie ©John Charles Thomas ■plays the swashbuckling hern of Under the Red Robe like a concert singer. 0 t0v^'«/ Ince has kept faithfully to the O'Neill drama. He has sugared nothing, softening it not a whit. More than that, he has succeeded in keeping the elusive spirit of the play. In the celluloid Anna Christie you will find — if you look for it — — all the call and menace of that "old davel," the open sea. O'Neill wrote into his story a deal of symbolism and that symbolism is still there. Anna Christie is bound to encounter the censors of our many states. A street walker, even by force of circumstances and even though she finds her measure of salvation, is fair game for the moral folks with the scissors. But Anna Christie is, nevertheless, a vital contribution to the screen. It means that the films are growing up, that life is something more than a callow series of adventures involving a wholly innocent flapper and ending when she reaches that supreme happiness of a sunset fade-out kiss. Anna Christie, praise be, is a real epic of the human strugglers groping everywhere for an intangible goal called everything from love to success. A, Blanche Sweet's Fine Playing -nna Christie is very sincerely directed by John Griffith Wray. As I have said, it holds to the drama with a fine fidelity. Only at the start is there a deviation reaching back into the past. The camera takes itself to Sweden to show the youth of Anna and her father. Here only is the film weak. Once it reaches the drab water-front saloon where the girl seeks out her father, Anna Christie rises to superb drama. Much of the power of the screen Anna Christie is due to Blanche Sweet, who plays the girl. Here is a performance at once fearless and moving. We know of no one on our screen who could have played it as well — or indeed would have dared to. Our stars, you know, will only play good women who photograph well. Miss Sweet makes Anna Christie live through every inch of the film. The rest of the cast is admirable. George Marion has his original role of the father and is as good as he was on the stage. William Russell contributes a surprising performance, sinking himself completely in the role of the grimy, arrogant, wheedling Irish stoker. And there is a fine bit of a wharf derelict by Eugenie Besserer. s The Eternal City Is Merely Garish amuel Goldwyn sent Director George Fitzmaurice and an expedition all the way to Rome to do Hall Caine's The Eternal City. The expedition returned with a garish thing which very likely will make money. Not that it approaches merit anv 52