Cinema: The New Pictures Feb. 11, 1924

The Marriage Circle. For his sec-ond production here* Ernst Lubitsch, German director, has produced a suave, beautifully finished comedy around the warning: “Don’t trust your husband or wife to your best friend!” A Viennese doctor and his wife try it. It’s only because the locale is insouciant Vienna that shooting doesn’t occur. The physician, rather unwillingly, becomes involved with a lecherous married woman, largely because his wife is jealous of the wrong girl. When the wife discovers how easy it is for a best friend to fall in love with her, peace is restored. “Sauce for the Goose” is snappily translated into “fifty-fifty.” A sly hint is given of the temptations to which a fashionable doctor is subjected by lovely patients with uncontrollable nerves and eyes. Never have Florence Vidor, Monte Blue, Creighton Hale, Marie Prevost acted so impossibly well. Not once is an emotion convulsively registered. Name the Man. Hall Caine and the Isle of Man are almost always sure to result in an unsanctioned baby. This production from his book, The Master of Man, runs true to form in almost every scene. The young lord of the isle has his impassioned way with a simple, sweet girl; subsequently she is tried for infanticide. The young lord has become the presiding judge, just to have an effective moment when he condemns his former flame to be hanged. She escapes to America. An index of the whole picture is the final scene when the lord, now in prison, is married in his cell to his betrothed, filling it almost entirely with her bridal attire. Victor Seastrom has directed with the taut technique of Scandinavia. The Stranger. Hope for the cinema lies in a photoplay like this adaptation of John Galsworthy’s story, The First and the Last. It is a sensitive and sensible study of the regeneration wrought in each other by two London outcasts, with only a single quotation from holy writ. A little bedraggled mill girl (Betty Compson) comes across the wastrel younger son of a wealthy family (Richard Dix) when the fortunes of both are ebbing away in their cups. Finding a new incentive in each other’s love, they are about to depart to the inevitable South Africa. In a struggle with the ex-wastrel, a flashy theatrical promoter is casually killed. It looks like a blow to South Africa. But a stranger, a queer, forlorn barroom porter who has befriended the girl, shoulders the guilt so they can still use the steamer tickets.

*The first was Rosita—with Mary Pickford.