The Month on the Screen

In Which the Leading and Most Recent Movies Are Reviewed

KENNETH MACGOWAN

THERE are some of us who suspect the motion picture of being a sumptuous entertainment and perhaps a new art. Potentially, at any rate. These incorrigibles discover each month four or five films that bolster their optimism. It is my purpose to try to save movie-bound readers from fifteen wasted evenings in the search for the golden five.

The search is particularly interesting just now, for the American picture is at the testing point. It has had two great advantages in its competition with the foreign product. It has had the advantage of American discovery, American curiosity, American energy and American resources in its early development. It has had the great commercial advantage of six years of war, during which it got its growth practically free from competition from abroad. Now come the foreign films—suffering from a late start and the bankruptcy of Europe, but ready to show us that something of the spirit of art may have escaped our active and prosperous picture makers.

Griffith and the Revolution

A GRIFFITH picture is the event of the film year. The screen owes more to this pioneer than to any man but the inventor of cinematography itself. The Avenging Conscience, The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Hearts of the World, Broken Blossoms and Way Down East have stepped off progress of one sort or another on the screen. This year the picture is Orphans of the Storm. If some other director had produced it, it would be an astonishing picture. Perhaps it is still an astonishing picture, but the astonishment is that Griffith should be content to make success—a very great success—out of serving up the French Revolution as deus ex machina to the troubled tale of The Two Orphans, and trotting out once more the justly celebrated race against death with which four of his half dozen big pictures have ended.

For the finish of Orphans of the Storm, Griffith has gone directly to The Mother and the Law section of Intolerance. He has traded the hangman's scaffold for a guillotine and the racing automobile for a troupe of French cavalry, and put back the costumes a hundred years. There is always a thrill in the old game of pretending the rescue may not arrive in time, but, in the cold blood of the morning after it seems a cheap expedient for the man who can make the court of Louis XVI a gorgeous foil to the fine emotional simplicity of Lillian Gish. I will say nothing of the man who could make Broken Blossoms.

As for the Revolution—well this is a vigourous and lively picture, but why did Danton fail to give the bride away? He rescued the elder of the two orphans after she had rescued him. He made "the greatest speech of his career" to save her from the guillotine. He raced five miles through the Paris streets, personally heading the troupe of cavalry bearing the reprieve.

A German Danton

THE German filmmaker has been considerably overpraised by those impatient with the gum-chewing age of the American movies. The German director does not understand the technique of the screen as ours does. But he understands art and acting, because he has worked in the finest theatres in the world. And he has an audience of understanding. Hence when he makes a film of the French Revolution, he does not do it as a convenience to the orphans of Kate Claxton; he hunts out the souls of Danton and Robespierre and their conflict, and if he finds Romain Rolland ready to help him, he does not object.

All for a Woman, we call it here— the Danton directed by Dimitri Buchowitzki, which the First National has imported. It is nothing of the sort. It is, rather, all for a man, this roaring, flaming, laughing and wenching fellow Danton. Buchowitski has been able to lift a great part of cast and story of Roland's Danton as it was done in Reinhardt's circus - theatre, the Grosses Schauspielhaus in Berlin. He has Emil Jannings of Deception and Passion to play Danton, and Jannings' eyes are eloquent. He has Werner Kraus of Caligari to play Robespierre, and he achieves a personification of Blue Law. Stiff-necked obliquity; and in his eye, suddenly, the toad and the snake. It is the spiritual man, if not the physical. As a production, All for a Woman has its bad points—its very bad points; but it rises to a triumph of setting and stage management in the trial scene. Perhaps it is more theatre than screen. It lacks the intimacy and the fusion that Griffith would create. But it lifts the individual action onto a plane with the grand procession of time.

Saturday Night

THE bane of the American screen has been its audience, or the producer's conception of its audience. That is all that holds back Griffith from continuing the progress he made ten years ago. That is all that holds back most of our directors.

Is Saturday Night a sign that the dominion of the gum-chewer is ended? It is the latest work of Cecil B. De Mille, a man who has given a great deal of energy of late years to what they called "society life" when the servant girl read The Duchess. De Mille has trailed across the screen a bedizened vision of the luxury that might descend upon any honest girl who happened to catch the eye of Roger van Stuyvesant. He still trails the vision. We still gaze on the very smartest sort of interiors, marvel over goldfish bowls set upon fur rugs, gasp at Hallowe'en bathing parties in the ballroom, and retire floored by such contrivances for hiding telephones and producing cigarettes as only the brain of a motion picture director can conceive of a normal human using.

But in Saturday Night De Mille ventures the heresy that the washwoman's daughter who marries into a tea gown may not live happily ever after. He ventures the almost equal heresy that a girl from Fifth avenue will not find joy over on Third. We see the rich man and the rich girl break their engagement to marry the poor girl and the poor man. We see the resultant difficulties. And we see them break it off and try it the other way. Will the big millions of the movie screen accept this challenge to their ancient faith ? The skill with which De Mille has handled his material, his screen-wise development of plot and incident, coupled with charming acting by Edith Roberts and Conrad Nagel, lead me to think they will.

"The Sin Floodf"

A MOST decided evidence that the producers are discovering intelligence in the great American public is to be found in Goldwyn's screen version of The Deluge. As The Sin Flood, this ironic and ingenious drama by the Swede, Henning Berger, has come through both the studio and the censors almost unscathed. The heroine is given a coat of moral whitewash, and an evangelical note is considerably stressed in the unfrocked clergyman. But most of the values of the play are retained on the screen. The miscellaneous little group of people are still caught by a flood in the saloon of a Mississippi town; behind flood-proof doors they await their destruction and win humanity and understanding as they stand there together "brothers in love"; when the danger passes, as quickly as it came, they emerge the same self-centred creatures that they were before. Only the girl and the man who had forgotten her retain a little of the new feeling that imminent death had brought to them.

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Here is a fine story indeed! It has been honestly and carefully filmed. It is not acted in some of the leading parts with all the intimate truth that one might desire, with all the truth in fact that three of the minor players, L. H. King, as a drunk, William Orlamond, as a Swede, and Otto Hoffman, as a broken-down actor, manage to summon. The director, Frank Lloyd, has also sinned in his lighting. It is far too bright and too undramatic for a mantrap lit only by candles. It makes one wonder what that singular and departed artist, George Loane Tucker, would have done with such a story. Yet unquestionably The Sin Flood pushes the screen forward.

February Releases of Moment

Nazimova in A Doll's House—United Artists; Norma Talmadge in Smilin' Through—First National; Westley Barry in Penrod, directed by Marshall Neiland—First National; a 30-reel German spectacle, The Mistress of the World— Famous Players-Lasky; Foolish Wives, directed by Eric von Stroheim—Universal; Turn to the Right—Metro; Lionel Barrymore in Boomerang Bill— Famous Players-Lasky.