Screenland (Oct 1924–Apr 1925)

78 SCREEN LAND Reviews In Brief—Continued from page 49 Baxter and Walter Hiers are seen in the important masculine roles and all do splendidly. We think Christine is decidedly worth seeing. K — THE UNKNOWN — Universal — And how Percy Marmont plays the mysterious "K!" Nobody else could have played it that way. Universal has made a swell adaptation with a cast that enacts it without affectation. And seeing it there in a first run house, not a fan was stirring, not even a mouse. The reason nobody was stirring, or even coughing, was because i-K" held them so completely enthralled that not a single bon-bon was passed for fear of missing some of Mary Roberts Rinehart's story. And so back to our poetry. He (Percy Marmont) hired him a nurse, charming of manner and soothing of verse (poetic license) who promptly made eyes at the boys in the ward, mixed up the bottles and gracious, migawd! killed three of the patients, rest they in peace; and Marmont was sought soon by the police. And so the plot of A" — The Unknown gets thicker and thicker. The doctor is forced to flee from the long arm of the law, and he turns up in a small town as a meter reader for the gas company. It is there he meets the girl (Virginia Valli), falls in love while still hiding his identity which he reveals only when he is compelled to perform an emergency operation. Now more poetry. So you are the doctor, Virginia didst say; the famous physician known only as K; well, well, ain't you the sweet one to be hiding away, reading gas meters for three bucks a day? And so they live happily ever after. And we had spent a right pleasant evening in the theatre. MY HUSBAND'S WIVES — Fox — Most of your picture stars, when they have scaled the heights of fame, begin looking around for a publisher to immortalize their artistry further in Moroccan bound autobiographies with hand painted illustrations. Not so Barbara La Marr. She chose, as her contribution to the literature of the world, a scenario written with her own dainty fingers and a pencil chewed author-style by the most screenperfect mouth in Hollywood. Barbara called it My Husband's Wives and William Fox thought the title good enough to retain. Vale Harvey {Shirley Mason) didn't care particularly about her husband's past. Yeh, she loved him. she did. So when she invited Marie Wynn, an old school chum. (Evelyn Brent) to visit her, she couldn't have known that Marie was the first wife of her own deah William (Bryant Washburn). The guest, conniving little devil that she was, immediately made preparations to vamp Bill back to hfir bosom in which (the censors must be salved ) she doesn't quite succeed. And so another love nest was made safe for domesticity. THE SIREN OF SEVILLE — Bunt Stromberg— So they took the $50,000 and staged a bull fight. But the bull couldn't get a horn in edgewise to gore the hero in the climax, so Priscilla Dean jumped down into the arena and wielded the fatal thrust. The game over, the fans swarmed to the subway station and dusk fell over the arena where the lovers stood whispering post-mortems about the fight. The Siren of Seville is really a delightful romance of castinettes and scarlet tinted sashes, credible enough if you've never seen a bull fight. But how Dolores (Priscilla Dean) could down a half ton of frenzied beef with a delicate thrust of a more delicate rapier is more than we could comprehend in a single sitting. However, this film is charmingly enacted before a background of beautiful settings. And the photography is enough to make even a motorman's daughter lean back and dream of lovely nights in Madrid, with a quarter moon riding lazily in the skies and a velvet jacketed dandy strumming a guitar under her balcony. What chance has the incredibility of the films in a setting like that? Allen Forrest plays Galkto, a Madridian commuter, who aspires to become the greatest matador in all Spain. He is jealous of Cavalo's (Stuart Holmes) attentions to Dolores, and so events lead up to a terrible tragedy. How wondrously does Holmes his villainy perform! If you can dream like the motorman's daughter, you'll like this film more than we did. We never dream. IN EVERY WOMAN'S LIFE — First National— In every woman's life, so nurse used to tell us as she droned us off to sleep at candle-lighting time, there are three distinct episodes in the natural development of feminine maturity. The first stage or episode is puppy (sometimes referred to as calf) love which usually puts in an appearance at the tender age of fourteen or fifteen bayleafed summers. In this case the man must be young, handsome and possess more of the qualifications of Apollo than Midas. The second stage is Romance or what is usually palmed off as romance. The stage for this act must be set in golden splendor wjith a Rolls Royce parked in every corner and costly drapings on the windows to keep out the light of cold, cruel facts of Life. To qualify in this stage the man must be a heavy sugar baby. The final episode is the dullest, the drabbest of the lot. It is called Marriage. To interpret his role here, the man must have no especial qualifications. Like the act itself, he need be just a dull, drab yokel who would look well sitting high up on the seat of a Ford roadster. All the foregoing is better told in a single-sub-title early in In Every Woman's Life. The film is a drama with a decided melodramatic tendency and a ghost of a moral always lurking in the shadows just outside the camera lines. The cast reminds one of those one act sketches at the Annual Equity Ball — they're all stars. Virginia Valli and Lloyd Hughes are the leads, and Marc McDermott, George Fawcett. Vera Lewis, Ralph Lewis. Stuart Holmes and John Sainpolis make up the support. You may safely expect this film to entertain you well. I HE TORNADO — Universal — King Baggot has turned out a lot of celluloid thrillers during his sojourn at Universal City, but there is more than a reasonable doubt that he has ever given Carl Laemmle a more powerful, more thunderous piece of screening than The Tornado, from the play by Lincoln Carter. Of course the screen version of Lincoln Carter's play is much superior to the original stage production. All the facilities of the Big U studio have been brought into play to make this the most sensational cinema of the season. House Peters plays a lumber camp boss as if he had been a jack in the Oregon timberland all his life, and Ruth Clifford couldn't have been improved upon for the leading feminine role. Dick Sutherland plays heavy — and you know Dick. See this film and bring hooks to hold on to the seat.