Cinema: The New Pictures Jun. 16, 1924

$20 a Week, The most interesting feature of this business comedy is that George Arliss looks almost startlingly like John D. Rockefeller in action, manipulating millions. It i§ therefore most appropriately a picture in which valuable stocks and bonds are bandied about like So many pieces of chewing gum. Arliss embodies a millionaire who takes a lowly clerical job in a rival company’s office to uncover a conspiracy, and incidentally reforms his shiftless son and saves him for the daughter of the rival house triumphantly to marry. There is novelty in the situation when this girl adopts a precocious brat and hef nervous brother, to square accounts, adapts Arliss as a father. It is the sort of picture which Americans are supposed to love, since it has comedy arid large business deals in it. But its appeal is chiefly through the quaint characterization and slow smile of Arliss, for the rest of the cast perform in rather convulsive manner. Taylor Holmes particularly can be quite distinctly heard screaming throughout most of it.

The Bedroom Window. The main mystery in this mystery melodrama is whether the audience are supposed to take it seriously. It deals with the solution of a murder during which most of the cast act, at times, in the most exquisitely idiotic manner. Ethel Wales, for instance, portrays a mannish woman novelist, who smokes insidious cigarettes and solves the crime, principally by climbing across an apartment house court on an ironing board. Even May McAvoy, who generally seems real even when the rest of the picture goes hang, is made to appear just a goofy little birdie. At that, the picture might have held the interest if it weren’t allowed to smoulder out at the end, when the murderer is unmasked in a cloud of subtitles. It looks as if somebody started out to make a bedroom farce and then thought of making it a thriller.

The Shooting of Dan McGrew. Another unconscious burlesque. Robert W. Service’s poem, which is alternative to Gunga Din for insistent reciters, has been thrown together on the screen in just the way that might be expected. The Yukon episode, which forms the poem, has been prefaced by incidents in a South Sea dance hall and a Broadway cabaret, from which the greatest pleasure is derived when the cabaret burns down—but without the loss of the chief performer, Barbara La Marr. She plays the lady known as Lou, who runs away with the gambler Dan into the Klondike where her piano-playing husband, through a faked telegram, is supposed to have lest his beautiful trust in her. He follows her to the Yukon, and there he and Dan shoot it out) after he has first made calf-eyes over a piano solo. Of course the husband isn’t killed—though Dan is— and after the little child rushe’s to his regenerated mother’s arms, the good-hearted denizens of the saloon bury their noses in a sentimental mug of beer.

The Reckless Age. Reginald Denny is fairly pleasing in this screen translation of the insurance salesman who straightens out a policy of a British nobleman insuring him against failure in his American fortune hunting. But what the screen, surfeited with tales of gilded youth, needs most of all is a picture called “Wild Grandpops.”