The New Pictures

The Fleet's In.

No laggards are the press agents of Clara Bow. For better or worse they have affixed to her the appositive name, "The It Girl," and the connotation to that title means to collegians, railway clerks, farm boys that Clara Bow is the personification of sex appeal. But Miss Bow also has histrionic ability. Some measure of praise is due her in this piece, in which she is the mercenary mink who works as a professional partner in a dancehall. Like the heroine in that play called Night Hostess, she maintains a nominal chastity--"she walks home alone"--but teases sailors out of gifts and dance tickets. Of one breezy gob she becomes enamoured and over her he starts a free-for-all fight. No peace-lover, his past record is against him when he is arrested. Unless he comes out of this scrape, he will be court-martialed.

On his day in court the virginal teaser appears as a voluntary witness, convinces the magistrate that she was the cause of the fight and tells the crowded courtroom (which includes her mother) that she is a lady of joy. The magistrate discharges the prisoner-gob, saying, "Instead of protecting you from these young men, we should protect them from you." This is not one of the best pieces, but it is one of Clara Bow's best. One Jack Oakie, as a sailor named "Searchlight," ought to get somewhere as a character actor with the flattest face on the two-dimensional medium. James Hall and the subtitles make the breezy gob almost true.

4 Devils. The cinema, said a punster, again has come to the four. There were The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Four Walls, Four Sons; there is 4 Devils; there will be The Four Feathers, a piece now in the casting process.

The four devils are acrobats, two male, two female, who come to the top trapeze of their profession. The story deals principally with the love of two of the foursome (Janet Gaynor and Charles Morton) and a rather elaborate exposition of backstage life--perennially acceptable theme. The discordant note in the quartet comes with the entrance of a strident villainess (Mary Duncan), done in the grandiose manner of Bara-esque sirens. In the early moments of the piece, when the child-lives of the four devils are revealed, two cinemasters, two cinemisses take the parts of the four devils and are notable for their strong resemblance to their adult colleagues. A plethora of film-footage retards the vehicle but never altogether halts it.

Janet Gaynor, newer to fame, is currently contrasted with Clara Bow. Clara stood for sex; Janet for sentiment. The Bow-sprite lingers at the great U. S. soda-fountain of youth, along with 'Varsity drags, high school fraternities, sheikism, shebaism, girls who say "If you don't think so, you're ca-RAzy," insipid youths who say "And I don't mean perhaps." More truly, with greater ease than any other cinemactress, the Bow-sprite typifies the slangy, vital grisette who frolics in and out of adolescence, does her marrying, gets the embonpoint.

Born a Quaker, Janet Gaynor & family left their native Philadelphia when Gaynor pere died. A stepfather, one Harry C. Jones, an electrician, took the family from city to city, settled in San Francisco long enough for Janet to graduate from Polytechnic High School. A Friendly placidity Janet Gaynor has retained in her less than four years in the cinema. No vixen, her chief characteristic is wistfulness. She is that Hollywood paradox, a lady.

Lonesome. The city awakes. From the skyscraper's tip to the telephone-girl's hall bedroom, to the young machinist's menage the camera sweeps. Comprehensively but incomprehensibly at times, because Director Paul Fejos has seen fit to be eccentric, the symphony of a new day is revealed. The story is relegated to comparative obscurity behind a maze of superimpositions, dissolves and other tricks of the camera. The story is simple. Lonely Barbara Kent and Glen Tryon, phone-girl & machinist, meet, separate, re-meet.

The Night Bird. Reginald Denny is a pugilist who, seeking surcease from a nightclub party, wanders into Central Park, discovers there a weeping Italian girl (Betsy Lee). The little signorina has a cruel guardian, who beats her, bruises her. Righteously indignant, the pugilist offers his protection. On the night of Denny's next fight the little girl is receiving the heavy hand of her father because she refuses to wed the man whom her father had chosen. The whole piece probably is based upon a fancied physical resemblance between Reginald Denny and James Joseph Tunney.

Heart to Heart. At the door of the goldenoak dining room of her Millertown, Ohio home, Aunt Katie Boyd (Louise Fazenda) watched her husband, Uncle Joe Boyd (Lucien Littlefield) entertaining a pretty woman with many a kiss, squeeze, hug. Aunt Katie crept away, bewildered, to a mirror, peered at her plain face, groped for her chair. Here was no display of grandiose histrionics, but only the cameractual portrayal of a homely homebody who finds her husband in the early stage of unfaithfulness. The next shots showed Aunt Katie being inordinately pleasant to her husband, instinctively struggling for her man. Eventually she learned the harmless truth, that the supposed seductress was her niece, who had married a Continental prince. Princess Delatorre (Mary Astor) had told the Boyds she was on her way home, but the Boyds and Millertown expected a grand lady in royal raiment, nor did anyone expect her on the day she arrived. Only Uncle Joe and Philip Lennox (Lloyd Hughes), her handsome onetime sweetheart, recognized her. It was the warm greeting of Uncle Joe to his niece which Aunt Katie mistook for an assignation.

This is not a bad piece. Lloyd Hughes is handsome enough, Mary Astor lovely enough for a cinematic romance; Louise Fazenda, Lucien Littlefield assure practically any piece's laugh content, even when they revert to slapstickery. Called a comedy, the moment of Aunt Katie's discovery of the princess in her husband's arms and her subsequent self-appraisal is one of the most poignant in one of the cinema's best years.

Citations

Six cinematic offerings of recent appearance which are above the rank and vile:

4 Devils (Janet Gaynor)--Reviewed in this issue.

The Docks of New York (George Bancroft)--A stoker on shore leave.

The Singing Fool (Al Jolson)--The debut of three-year-old David Lee.

The Patriot (Emil Jannings)--Lewis Stone at his good best.

Heart to Heart (Mary Astor)--Re-viewed in this issue.

Forgotten Faces (Olga Baklanova)-- Olga Baklanova.