Judge — January 6, 1923 — page 15: what you’re looking at

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

a Ruth Hale’s Movie Page Motors and Miscellany E RECOGNIZE the fact that to make this page as harmonious as possible, we must mention the motors. We have figured it out that movies and motors have made common cause of getting a lot of people closer to- gether than they ever were before. Then we asked: “Got them together for what?” and up to the moment of actually writing copy, we have found no answer that is good enough. This is a very hard ques- tion a yy, so perhaps we can be ex- cused for not getting it. Unfortunately, it was to have been our main contribution to Motor Week, and failing it, we shall simply have to go on to Wesley B some letters, and the educational “1 Ras? new Barry picture is called Heroes of the Street.” Iti ngey », which starts out as one thing, be- comes another, and another, and so forth, but is held together by the central character. The casting is good, too. There is diversity of form and feature among the players, so that they do not to be re-introduced by titles at +h new appearance. Barry is a pleas- ant little actor, with some talent, but we led at the thought of what he e when he grows up. Most of the tricks of his freckled little face passable in a boy, but when he another inch or two, he will probably to buckle down and learn his trade ve it. We found in “Heroes of the a commendable disposition on the Street’ d i part of William Beaudine, the director, to trust to the eloquence of small things. The death of a policeman was announced to the spectators, who had seen him go into a place of danger, by a picture of the legs and feet. of two other policemen marching in military slow time. The terrible tramp-tramp of those legs was as ominous as anything in the world could be. This, after all, is the true magic stuff of the pictures. WILE we have been discoursing on feature pictyres, another kind has been growing up beside them which de- serve pretty nearly all the praise that the ‘tures do not. These are the estrangingly Hed “educa- and the news servic The news services are tremendously important. Also they are tremendously interesting. The: > at least four news services which lent: the Pathe, the Fox, the International and the Selznick, and there are probably many more that we do not remember. Th servi liter- ally girdle the world. If Queen Marie of Roumania goes out in the rain for her coronation the cameras follow her to the least town of the kingdom. If some cheerful people in a hamlet in Ohio invent a new game or a picturesque sport the Broadway theaters are showing it inside of a week. If explorers climb Mt. Aetna the camera and the tripod are lugged up right after them. Nothing that has been of the slightest moment to the public for years has been neglected by the news pictures, ‘They are productive, too, of a good deal of emotion. We have s¢ some of our statesmen hissed fiercel. they beamed down from the screen and others applauded long and loud. We saw a theater thrown into the wildest nic once when an alert cinema com- pany presented on Friday night the pic- ture of the funeral of Calmette which had taken place on Thursday afternoon. For the few days that had intervened be- tween the shooting of Calmette by Madame Caillaux, all Paris had been in a ferment of little riots, but at the actual funeral the disorders had been checked and they did not break out again till the funeral pageantry was shown on the screen. There the partisanry became so violent that the theater was cleared, and all the Calmette films were de- stroyed next morning by the Prefect of Police. We have also seen a considerable number of private fights in theaters here in our town over whether the picture of Governor-elect. Smith should be cheered or jeered. There is, in fact, an amazing vitality in news pictures, Barring their passion for naval maneuvers of all kinds, of which we have long since wearied, we are 100 per cent. in favor of them. have long since T2 educational films ceased to be the doings in the canning factories or the anatomy of the flowers. They are full of the drama and color of little known things and of news of things that could by no other means be known to more than a very few people. A mil- lion people, for example, would probably be willing to take a fair amount of trouble to see a mother fishhawk distributing fish driblets to her children. But a fair 13 amount of trouble wouldn't be enough. It takes sometimes weeks of patient stalk- ing. Will Rogers told of two women he who wanted to take some motion pictures of certain wild birds and they failed time and again because the instant the sound of the camera began the birds flew off. Finally, they got an old coffee mill and took turns at standing near the tree, grinding anc grinding, till the birds were no longer alarmed at the sound nor flighty when the camera began. Rogers was primarily interested in this as a de- vice to be used on his actors, in which, as we remember, he got no support from his director. But it shows what has to be done to capture and record the very best sights and if one scrupulous and long-suffering camera man can do it, in this present scheme, for a million interested people, a true social economy has been effected. unusu W: FIND JUDGE readers hearty correspondents. Also, we grieve to add, some of them like to be anonymous. Oddly enough, many of the anonymous ones are friendly and en- couraging. One, which was not in the least friendly, interested us very much because of what its author regarded as a proper scolding. It begins like this: “I have made a wager that you are either an old maid or a woman over forty with an ugly husband . . . or are not acquainted with any attractive young men.” The writer was obviously very mad at us— but what a curious choice of missiles to hurl! They seem so old-fashioned. It is signed “A Movie Fan,” and we rather fear he The movies have kept it from him entirely that “old maid” is no longer an epithet. Even being forty, with an ugly husband, would not, we think, be the very dregs of woe. Incidentally, we cannot let the implication rest against our husband. Except for Clive Weed’s drawings of him, done with obviously malicious intent, he is a very fine figger of a man. We have prepared a course, sent free on demand, called “Expert in- sulting, in ten ea It is guar- anteed up to date, fires long and short and splits the bracket. If the movie fan wants to get at my vitals it will be the very thing for him. Too many movies are not good for any man. lessons.”