Wid's weekly (1923)

IT SATURDAY TT (i -^^WEEKLY IX OCTOBER 20, 1923 77j/s Surely Is For No Good Reason” In Search of a Thrill Metro Length 5 Reels DIRECTOR . Oscar Apfel AUTHOR . Kate Jordan’s story, adapted by Basil Dickey and Winifred Dunn. CAMERAMAN . John Arnold GET ’EM IN . It has routine Dana program pull¬ ing value. Nothing more. PLEASE ’EM . They walk too far to get one sit¬ uation with much that misses in incidental se¬ quences, so this will hardly please. WHOOZINIT . Viola Dana, Warner Baxter, Tem¬ plar Saxe, Mabel Van Buren, Rosemary Theby and Walter Wills. SPECIAL APPEAL . The only hokum exploitation angle mould be an argument about “animal pets or babies.” STORY VALUES . They meant well but got lost in telling it. TREATMENT. . . There were good production values, but story construction made it slow and unin¬ teresting. CHARACTERIZATIONS . Miss Dana puts on a disguise, but several million people in this coun¬ try could have picked her cut by her eyes. There is no outstanding or particularly com¬ mendable bit of work in this. ARTISTIC VALUES . Sets and lightings were quite satisfactory, but these were wasted on dra¬ matic action that meant nothing. This one won’t get over. It wasn’t much of an idea to start with and they messed it up quite some. They devote considerable footage to proving that Viola is a society dumb-bell very much interested in a monkey pet. Hero shows an interest in people of the underworld, so Viola decides to masquerade as an Apache to fool him. Hero takes shero through all the Paris underworld, pointing out the suffering of human¬ ity. After they have escaped from a den of murder¬ ers, he explains that he knew her all the time and was just showing her the sights to give her some sense. Your audience is going to gain an impression that the hero is rather a dumb-bell for not recognizing Viola immediately. If this had been played so that the audi¬ ence knew that he knew who she was, there would have been at least some chance for values. As it is, the possible surprise gained by his nonchalant state¬ ment that he had known her all the time surely doesn’t begin to compare with the possible drama that might have been secured if the audience had known that he knew her all the time he was taking her into danger to teach her a lesson. After establishing Viola as a good spender in Paris at the opening of this, they cut back to a retrospect showing her inviting struggling young author hero in for a Christmas tree celebration. They give him on his entrance the very terrible title, “I forgot all about it being Christmas.” There ain’t no sech animal. It just can’t be done. Having thus established hero as a weird person, they show us in the next reel that Viola for no reason at all suddenly leaves a dinner party of friends in a cabaret and does a dance with an Apache entertainer. ■ Once more I say, “It ain’t done.” Viola’s doing the dance caused Rosemary Theby to decide to stick a knife in Her Apache lover and then, when the hero talked the cops out of pinching Rose¬ mary, Viola decided that she would masquerade as an Apache and steal into hero’s apartment “just for a lark.” Inasmuch as the hero’s intentions are not clarified, the travelogue through the Paris underworld while he was showing Viola around became very tedious. The fact that the Apache dancer walked right up and rec¬ ognized Viola by her “lily-white hands” made the hero seem that much more of a dumb-bell, inasmuch as the audience still were allowed to believe that he didn’t know who she was. 1 don't see any particular reason why you should play this. Tt’s just one of those things. It has no particular merit. It certainly is not entertainment. At the end they tag this off with the time-honored wet baby gag, and if anything was needed to definitely stamp this as most ordinary that did it. It is true that you may get a laugh with that gag just the same as you can get applause by waving a flag; but a laugh gained by such a gag at the end of this sort of film doesn’t help in the general check-up as regards this being considered worth an evening, let alone the price of admission. They pull one set of titles between Baxter and Miss Dana for which somebody should be shot at two o’clock in the morning without even waiting for sun¬ rise. Dana says to Baxter, in talking about a young society lady (this lady being Miss Dana), “Perhaps she too needs a friend.” And Baxter replies, “I would think not — she has a monkey.”