Cinema: The New Pictures Dec. 19, 1927

Aftermath. Like most German importations, this one, effected by the Collwyn organization, enhances its drama with a slow and deliberate tempo, unfolds its story with a sombre and decisive insistence. In the remote and improbable province of Rupolosia among the barbaric villainies of a military governor, the ravages of his soldiery, and assorted chicaneries of minor characters, the widow Nadja struggles bravely to retain possession of her manor house— an edifice which, as depicted, does not justify her heroisms. In the part of this lady a new, highly able and presumably Russian actress is discovered to the U. S. screen, one Olga Tschechowa. Despite effective rascality in the other roles, the picture, because its entangled plot is strained, cold, brittle and exotic, has no bludgeoning effect.

Man, Woman and Sin. Under this unpretentious title, John Gilbert, in the role of a cub-reporter, pursues Sin as ably impersonated by Jeanne Eagels. The climax of his pursuit occurs when he murders the source of the demimondaine’s income; she perjures herself to avoid scandal; and then, because she loves the cub-reporter, confesses her paying to save his life. The able direction of one-time newspaperman Monta Bell, the able performances of Actor Gilbert and of Actress Eagels, make it possible to forgive certain weaknesses in the story. The weakness of the conclusion in which Mr. Gilbert wobbles off with his mother (adequately played by Gladys Brockwell) can be largely forgiven because its frailty is not due to an abortive attempt to satisfy the unsophisticated appetite for rose petals and wedding bells at every story’s end.

The City Gone Wild becomes, suddenly and unfortunately, in the midst of a great crackle of bullets and bad-words, a cinema gone mild. It ends in a crescendo of sentimentality when Thomas Meighan, the lawyer for many a badman of the underworld, reforms and, as crusader, discovers that his sweetheart’s father is the biggest gun among the gunmen. Eventually, the guilty are punished and the innocent spared.

Get Your Man, like most of Clara Bow’s productions, is constructed almost entirely upon the theme of her celebrated sex-appeal. In this one she meets a standardized, youthful, French aristocrat on the point of marrying a girl he does not love because he has been engaged to her practically since birth. Clara Bow, in the part of his true inamorata, finds ingenious and not unentertaining devices which permit this tragic possibility to be avoided. Through these devices the “It” motif, which sounded loudly through It and Hula, runs like the sound of ten trombones and a fiddle.

Cheating Cheaters. Almost the entirety of the plot is expressed in the title. In detail, it concerns two bands of thieves who are busily engaged in stealing from one another, each unaware that the other band is devoted to the same purpose. By the time that this point is cleared up, Betty Compson (who has been a detective all along) arrests both bands of robbers. Though totally ineffective as badmen, the thieves are comparatively comic, which is what they are intended to be.

Wild Geese, brushing across a cobwebbed sky, become for Judith Gare the symbol of a freedom she achieves when her father’s avarice finally traps him into death. Spots of melodrama, blotches of theatrical emotion do less, to mar the story than to prove that sincere acting can make these defects seem trivial. Belle Bennett (whose reward for a fine performance in Stella Dallas has been a succession of mediocre roles) and Eve Southern (who wore dark hair and a fixed expression in The Gaucho) are competent to effect a more than satisfactory transposition of Martha Ostenso’s bestselling, prize-winning fiction.

Jungle Gods is one more travel picture (this time African and made by a Captain von Hoffman) in which savages display smirking artificialities much like those so constantly practiced by semi-civilized migrates to the cinema lots of Southern California. As they go through the motions of tribal ritual—king-crowning, lion-hunting, getting married, they manage not to fall into the anticipated postures of improper ingratiation. But they are always ready to roll their eyeballs, with evident satisfaction, at the camera man, thus detracting from the illusion that their curious behaviour is entirely unaffected.