Judge — November 11, 1922 — page 17: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

li- 0- Ss Ruth Hale’s Movie Page Superficial Conclusions ture. Some of its mo cloudy, but its story is interesting and told without too many stops for moral reflection. Its chief moral, in fact, is one which would undoubtedly appall Mr. Thomas Ince, a man not re- markable for social rd that if beauty is only s| ter. But this is not admitted in the picture without a certain struggle, and, for that matter, many things are said which flatly contradict it. Motion pic- ture authors and producers have this way of charging and hedging on Truth, and probably it is the best they can hope to do. Putting new wine in old bottles is not the best way to preserve the wine, but it’s by all odds the best way to sell it. And putting brave facts into deceptive containers is the way to get them a wel- come in strange company. Si DEEP” is a pretty good pic. e HAKESPEARE wrote “Richard HT” on the theory—at least upon the fact—that a man too harshly dealt with ature would turn to crime as prac- tically the only entertainment left open to him. It has come to be accepted, though by no means admitted, that man will not drag through the rather difficult business of living unless he feels that he is making an impression, favorable, of course, upon some large or small number of his fellow-men. Man insists upon being liked, or at the least upon being admired. It is to his credit, perhaps, that he would really prefer being liked. He feels that his life is worth while if he is personable, and pleasant to have around. His following may even narrow down to his wife and his mother. But if he is ill-begotten, unengaging and homely as a hedge fence, and if, in addition, he has had no chance to shine by his intellect, and therefore knows that liking for him is out of the question, there is no known way to make him good. This is a hard conclusion, and one bitterly contended against by the upholders of virtue as its own reward. But hard or soft, it is un- happily true, and lo and behold! we actually find a motion picture which is built on a hard and unpalatable fact. TH reason is, probably, that it i: le to present a counter-irri in Deep” says that if a man is re- voltingly plain, he will be found of neces- sity in the underworld. It then says that plastic surgery can make a beauty where none was before, and that nothing but willfulness now stands in the way of uni- versal reform. Bud_ Do; the chief character of “Skin Deep,” is played by Milton Sills. When we first meet our hero he is abun- dantly plain. Mr. Sills’ make-up _ is nothing half-way. Bud Doyle’s nose, for example, perfect mountain of putty. Its extensions could still be seen from a straight rear view. His ears bulged in every direction. Curiously enough, he had a young and beautiful wife, though the picture did not tell how he got her. It is one of the most irritating things that motion pictures do; this bald omission of their really important scenes. However, consistency was maintained by having the young and beautiful wife dis- like Bud immensely, so that, shortly after he came back from the war, he was “framed up the river.” NCE he was up there, he was sorely missed by his gang. There was nobody left who was homely and coura- geous enough to kill the district attor So Bud had to be rescued, and a v fine rescue it was. Granting that prison guards could be so easily distracted by a fake fire in an airplane as to let Bud scale the wall by a rope and leap to the top of a passing train, the salvaging of him by a ladder dropped from an airplane was plausibly and thrillingly done. We were not quite so credulous when the plane flew low, letting on that it could not rise with the “extra burden” of a rather thin man, and scraped Bud off the ladder with the tops of some trees. But what with one thing and another Bud was finally credibly smashed up and along came a doctor who, by a miracle of good fortune, was a plastic surgeon with a very warm heart for ex-service men. Bud had fortunately been tattooed on the wrist with the mark of his old regiment. Now you can guess the rest. He came out 15 of the hospital the very picture of manly beauty and crime had no more attrac- tion for him. Of course his wife didn't know him—not till he told her, when he had just caught her red-handed in some bedevilment for which he sent her off to Reno. There was just one very fine bit of photography in in Deep”—it was done too often, but it was fascinating. It was in making his old face re-appear to the people who recognized him, with only ame, and then in losing the gain in the plastic beauty. THE increasing habit of the picture theaters to hold a good film over for as many weeks as it will carry is an ex- cellent one, and we would like to encour- age it, but it carried us, this week, to Gloria Swanson in “The Impossible Mrs. Bellew” as the only film we had not seen. and it has to be an awfully good scheme to reconcile us to that. Mrs. Bellew was indeed impossible. We won't be driven to her like again. Rad Ye Ancient Corkscrew by Clarence Mansfield Lindsay This Is a Corkscrew, Once Well Known to All with Cellars of Their Own—But Now ’Tis Very Seldom Seen; Though Kept Within the Memory Green; ‘Tis Just as Well, We Now Walk Straight, Whereas of Old We Struck a Gait as tor-