Let’s go to the movies!

Media

Part of The American Chamber of Commerce Journal

Title: Let’s go to the movies!
Creator: Read, George
Language: English
Year: 1928
Rights
Fulltext: April, 1928 THE AMERICAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE JOURNAL 15 * * * Let’s Go to The Movies! * * Being a Critique of Leading Current Screen Offerings By Mrs. George Read THE BIG PARADE. One cannot casually say of Laurence Stalling’s scenario, The Big Parade, shown this month at the Ideal, simply that here is another good war picture. It is a convincing account, in the main, of human beings in war. It is a snapshot cf the man who thinks and the man whe does not think. Both of them feel. It is an admirable attempt to portray by means of the physical world the idea of war. And Laurence Stalling’s idea is not a glorious but an unhappy one. The young writer must be weary by now of having everyone call attention to the fact that he was a serious blessG de la guerre. The fact has been exploited in advertising everything he has yet offered the public. He has been dragged befoie the curtain in the New York playhouse where his and Anderson’s—we believe it was Maxwell Anderson who was co-author—What Price Glory? of fended the universal optimists and militarists so profoundly, and had his missing leg all but pointed at. In fact many people took the stand that that was the reason he let himself be coerced into the glare of the footlightsand, perhaps, feeling that way about, it hardened their hearts against the living document he himself is of the cruel destruction of War. Almost the first subtitle of the picture reads: John Gilbert in the leading role makes live the young man of perception, the young man who is carefree, who is thoughtful without being too introspective, gay without being reckless, who finds himself caught up in the om, and the road :n mobilithe United States by what was o whole years, ,>aign of sledgebrought the country ie greatest morsel of bunk the propagandists fed the multitude; a poisoned manna which the youth of many countries swallowed whole, and marched out together Rente AdorCe, beautiful and competent star in The lhg Parade. See text In The Big Parade we are conscious that the author is well aware of this humorous side, but that he seeks to go farther, and to portray the feeling of lyric sacrifice that agitates the breast of the true soldier. Frances Ledwidge in Ireland, Rupert Brooke in England, Alan Seeger in America, all spoke the same language; and it was the single voice of the thousand thousand who did drink the sacrificial cup to the dregs. Far finer than the commonly quoted Rendezvous With Death of Alan Seeger, are his Liebstod and The Hosts. From the latter we read— There was a stately drama writ By the hand that peopled the earth and air And set the stars in the infinite And made night gorgeous and morning fair. And all that had sense to reason knew That bloody drama must be gone through. And from the Truth or delu Yet think it t That thought When to the Heads high ai And we shall Eyes looked on us in which we would seem fa One waited in whose presence we would wea Even as a lover who would be well seen, Our manhood faultless and our honor clean. It will be remembered that he was a member of the Foreign Legion, and fell at the battle of Belloy-en-Santerre in July, 1916. The scenes in No Man’s Land in The Big like a stately epic drama, al objection that the according to the actual ig the allies; that the in their lines and so forth nes did not purport to be Instead, they were staged to convey the impression of millions of indivi duals going together to what? To annihilation or to resurrection? The artillery barrage, suns and moons bursting in space, comets of momen tary duration flaming across the void, earth sending up its boulders and herbage, its granite foundations and vestiges of devastated pastoral beauty under the indifferent heavens. And in the midst of it all, wave on wave of human beings being vastly destroyed, the while they destroyed one another. Jimmie’s goodbye to his mother on the eve of his departure for France is one of the best scenes in the picture, filled with excellent ones. Here is no Spartan mother who bids her son come home with his shield or upon it. Here is human intelligence and perception and devotion; the recollection of the young child alive to the ecstasy of living and at the same time the full appreciation of the man-child still in love with living, going prematurely to his death. Not only the conception of the role, but Claire MacDowell’s acting conveyed most movingly the idea of responsibility engendered by parenthood and the deeply rooted instinct to protect the offspring from danger, with the last drop of energy. There were no theatrics on the part of either Miss Macdowell or of John Gilbert at any moment in the picture, with the exception of the scene in No Man’s Land when good taste was strained to the breaking point. Jimmie goes out over the barbed-wire entangle ments to look for his friend “Slim” calling him at the top of his lungs. All is quiet except the occasional fire of a machine gun. Probably, his commanding officer would have shot him for the insane disclosure of the whereabouts of The Big Parade evidences neither the dis gruntled spirit of John Dos Passes nor the bit terness of Henri Barbusse. However, it bears actual witness to the causes of Barbusse’s bit“National aspirations,” says Barbusse in Light, “confessed or unconfessable, are contradictory among themselves. All populations which are narrowly confined and elbow each other in the world are full of dreams vaster than each of them. The nations’ territorial ambitions over lap each other on the map of the universe, eco nomic and‘financial ambitions cancel each other mathematically. Then in the mass they are unrealizable. “And since there is no sort of higher control over this scuffle of truths which are not admis sible, each nation realizes its own by all possible means, by all the fidelity and anger and brute force she can get out of herself. By the help of this state of world-wide anarchy, the lazy and slight distinction between patriotism, imperialism and militarism is violated, trampled, and broken through all along the line, and it cannot be otherwise.” There have been excellent war pictures re leased which have only sought to play on one string, that of the humorous side of the situation. In a way, they have been of a high order and indicate a fine attitude, from the individualistic A Valuable Health Hint! It is far better to drink plenty of milk than to unduly tax your digestive powers with too much heavy food. Thousands of people in the Islands, both young and old, drink “BEAR” BRAND natural MILK because they find it gives quickly the needed nourishment, repairs the waste, and so surely renews VIM and VIGOR, without undue strain on the organs of digestion. Sold everywhere in large and small cans 16 THE AMERICAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE JOURNAL April, 1928 his troops when every pore of the earth was apt to have an enemy ear. Renee Adoree was charming as Jimmie’s sweetheart. She was alluring without being openly sex-conscious,—a distinct relief to an it-surfeited public. She overdid nothing, with one exception, and she cannot be held respon sible for that. She hangs onto Jimmie’s leg as he climbs into the truck that is to take him to the front, and when his leg does not obediently dismember itself and stay behind, Melisande (Miss Adoree) then swings onto the back of the truck and appears to think that all she has to do to keep it from getting away from her is to hang on tenaciously. She is dragged in the mud for yards and yards, yet when she finally lets go and rises to her feet, she looks more lovely than she has lcoked in the entire drama— in spite of mud and tears. So that we are ready to overlook that absurdity. But what Melisande fails to do, a German machine gun very effectively does, that is to say, it removes the leg. It is with pleasure that we find Jimmie’s fiancee on the verge of marrying Jimmie’s broth er when the war is over and he returns home. We doubted her, along with Jimmie, from the first, for having a brass-button complex, and saying “You’ll look gorgeous in a uniform. I’ll love you more than ever. When are you going overseas?” And we felt even me re elated when Jimmie announced to his mother, his relieved mother who had suffered a disillusion in advance for her sen, that there was a girl in France, and his mother says, “Then there is nothing else that matters”. Romance if you like, but who does not like it? And when we see Melisande and her mother resowing the ruined fields, preparing the land with plow and oxen, as the women did, and the long classic line of soaring, fluttering poplars against the subdued French sky, we wonder if it was not France that Jimmie ached to return to, as well as Melisande. Don Juan. “If the movies have ever pro duced a picture that justifies the most extrava gant superlatives, then Don Juan is that pic ture,” says the Manila Times of March 25. “Nothing about it, from the star to the last details of the authentic setting, but can be said to be the greatest and finest ever.” Of course we realize the Times isn’t being serious, but if one goes on speaking in super latives indefinitely one will in time reduce one’s vocabulary to a row of exclamation points, about as intelligible as the Eskimo parlance of the comic strip. Truly the movie flimsy, or whatever it is called, in most daily’ papers, tells absolutely nothing about a picture. Is one reading a critique of Monte Cristo? Or is it Monte Carlo this week? The flimsy tells one and the same thing. It is the most marvelous picture yet shown on the screen and the parts are more gorgeously, humorously, beautifully taken than any parts ever assumed by any actors and actresses since the world began. But speaking of Don Juan, why all this blurbal matey-ness with the quick Fairbanks and the dead Valentino? Can’t the poor dog wag his own tail? The Times goes on to say that even if John Barrymore had never before been heard of—perhaps there is due significance in this, for who under the sun could associate him, for example, with the young poet of The Jest?— his work in Don Juan would be suf ficient to establish him as an equal—one of the many equals?—of Fairbanks and Valentino in the minds of countless trillions of screen devotees.” Another daily places him on the same high level of acting with Estelle-JackDempsey-Taylor, whose imagination might be stretched to encompass what went on Up in Mabie’s Room, but hardly more than that. In other words, she is a retailer of the common or garden variety of S. A., with which the movie market is vulgarly flooded. As Lucrezia Borgia she is convincing enough, if that is your con ception of Lucrezia Borgia. However, as in the case of the purple cow, it’s easier to see a Borgia than to be one. If we were called upon to better the things we so ardently cry down, most of us CHARTERED BANK OF INADiAD cahuintaral,a Capital and Reserve Fund......................................... £8,000,000 Reserve Liability of Proprietor................................ 3,000,000 MANILA BRANCH ESTABLISHED 1872 SUB-BRANCHES AT CEBU, ILOILO AND ZAMBOANGA Every description of banking business transacted. Branches in every important town throughout India, China, Japan, Java, Straits Settlements, Federated Malay States, French Indo-China, Siam, and Borneo: also in New York. Head Office: 38 Bishopsgate, London, E. C. T. H. FRASER, Manager. would be in a sorry plight. Yet everyone has the privilege.of stating preferences, with whys and wherefores. As to our preference for acting in Don Juan, it went in bulk to Mr. Montagu Love as the swashbuckling, licentious, domineering Donati. Every man is selfconscious in his own right. Mr. Love as Donati was unobjectionably so, and at the same time undemandingly charming and witty. But Mr. Barrymore was so exquisitely pleased with every one of his own changes of facial expression that he must have the camera focus upon each with a time exposure. We would enjoy seeing him play the Pied Piper of Hamlin in the same costume he wore when he did his dipping swallow leap at Donati’s neck in the typical movie final fight. So far as the Fairbanks cliches were concerned, the stage business would have been convincing enough in films like The Gaucho and The Mark of Zorro, but for fastidious noblemen of the Cinquecento, fisticuffs seem inappropriate compared to Dear Bill: I Take My Pen in Hand To Say . . . Life would be fine and comfortable in a nipathatch house in the Philippines, were it not for the inmates: the sedrpions, spiders, centipedes and millipedes, cockroaches, termites (white ants), flies, ant lions, book lice, doing havoc to one’s library, butterflies, shedding noisome pollen into the butter-tin, moths, supplementing the not altogether puerile efforts of the butterflie, to make the evening meal uncomfortable, fleass bees, wasps, ants (true ants of a dozen species and countless varieties—all with the typical antish proclivities), beetles, frogs, lizards (in cluding the vulgar and notorious talking lizard), and bats, carnivorous and vegetarian, only to be told apart by an examination of their teeth. You catch a bat, when you have acquired the necessary technique, of course, hold him down in such a manner as will prevent his thumbnails from slitting the arteries in your wrists, and, prying open his jaws with a convenient pair of pincers, examine his mouth under the light of an oil lamp burning fitfully between times when flying ants, moths and butterflies are using it for a cremation plant. If the grooves in your fellow-householder's teeth run cross-wise, put a steel-mesh glove on your hand and wring his neck—whereupon the ants will take care of him. If, however, the grooves run lengthwise in his teeth, turn him loose with due apologies, since the worst he will do is to devour your garden. And in the tropics one may always make a new garden. The only drawback is, the ravenous hordes of bats and their aids and accomplices WELCH - FAIRCHILD, LTD. SUGAR FACTORS AND EXPORTERS MANILA, P. I. Agents Hawaiian - Philippine Company Operating Sugar Central Silay, Occ. Negros, P. I. Mindoro Sugar Company San Jos4, Mindoro, P. I. Cable Address: WEHALD, Manila Standard Codes stilettos and rapiers. We regretted that Don Juan did net neatly run Donati through, as we believe was the socially accepted thing to do in the days when the more famous Borgias emigrated from Spain. Donati was his man. If he chose to let him go, well and good. If he did not so choose, and this Don Juan did not, the final thrust would have been brief, elegant, much to the point. But Hollywood would not get out of its time-honored groove. The stiletto must be placed on the floor within struggling distance of the villain. The villain must possess himself of it. The hero, now justified in no longer considering his adversary’s life, takes the stiletto away from him and stabs him effec tually to death. Mr. Barrymore registered much the same expression of sensuous satiety as he washed his hands of Donati as he did when he was gesturing graceful get-thee-gones to the innumerable beauties who surrounded him. There was much atmosphere of marbledhall sets, and little or nothing of Renaissance Italy. among the insects are well aware of this, and, when your repeated efforts have borne fruit, return to devour the fruit. Francis X. Williams, an entomologist in the employ of the Hawaiian Sugar Association, spent two years at research in the Philippines, lived in nipa houses, and found his companions in these huts that house the Filipino millions so diverting that he produced a paper about them which appears in the current issue of The Phil ippine Journal of Science. He found a good name for the paper too: The Natural History of a Philippine Nipa House. What could be more apropos than that? The materials of such a house are rattan thongs in lieu of nails, bamboo in lieu of posts, beams, rafters, sheeting and siding, and the fronds of nipa palms made into a huge but light and feathery type of shingle. These shingles are fastened to bamboo strips laid over the rafters, with thin rattan thongs, and stouter thongs hold the strips fast to the rafters. Still stouter thongs lash the rafters together in pairs and as the framework of an entire roof. So you go on, with, bigger and stronger rattans, tying the house together and lacing the floor, of bamboo strips, down to the joists of round bamboo beneath it. In pastoral countries God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, until the lamb is fat enough to go to the butcher’s. In the Philippines, He doesn’t need to mind about the wind. There (Concluded on page 34) New York Agents: Welch, Fairchild & Co., Inc. 135 Front Street San Francisco Agents: Welch & Co., 215 Market Street IN RESPONDING TO ADVERTISEMENTS PLEASE MENTION THE AMERICAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE JOURNAL