Cinema: The New Pictures Oct. 22, 1928

The Night Watch. Billie Dove takes the stand in defense of her husband, Paul Lukas, murder suspect and captain of a French battleship. Who killed Nicholas Soussanin, young lieutenant found dead on board the cruiser by the Admiralty committee that came to congratulate the Captain for sinking the Istria? Out of Billie Dove’s testimony the story flows in retake with dignity and pictorial effectiveness — the night the War began when the officers’ wives came on board for dinner and Billie Dove, delayed by the importunities of a onetime suitor, one of the officers, was caught on board; how Soussanin, a loose-lipped fellow, enemy of the captain, detected her in the cabin of her onetime wooer and made trouble. And how the suitor, Donald Reed, killed him and was killed himself in battle with the Istria. The gentlemen of the admiralty court put on their caps and declare the Captain innocent. Best shots: Miss Dove in evening dress.

Our Dancing Daughters shows young life cocktailored by Director Harry Beaumont. It is exactly the atmosphere on the screen that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books have when you read them and that they do not have when filmed. Joan Crawford, a nice girl who acts wild, and Anita Page, a nastv but quiet girl, are after Rich John Mack Brown. Miss Crawford, competent actress, drinks out of the cocktail glasses of three young men and later in the evening kisses three young men in turn, in public, and Rich Boy Brown marries mercenary Miss Page. Young love is thwarted. But one night after a party at the yacht club Miss Page, now Mrs. Brown, gets drunk and falls downstairs and breaks her neck and young love is set straight again. Hundreds of young women crowded the theatres where this picture showed last week. Romantic vocal melodies on the vitaphone accompany the soapy looks and violent embraces of the principals. Best shot: a nameless extra in a cap and an army shirt sweeping out the empty ballroom of the club after the party.

The Mating Call. Thomas Meighan comes home from the War to a Southern village to find that Evelyn Brent, whom he left at the station the day they were married, has had the marriage annulled and tied herself to Alan Roscoe. She still likes Meighan and hangs around his farm so much that the Ku Klux Klan warns him to let married women alone. Meighan wants a wife and no jezebelling so he goes to Ellis Island and makes a deal with an immigrant girl, Renee Adoree. A subplot (Roscoe has a mistress) makes possible a climax complicated in synopsis but effective melodrama on the screen. James Cruze directed and Rex Beach, who taught many studio writers all they know about making a thriller, wrote the story. Best shot: Renee Adoree in swimming at night in a coal black river. Good entertainment.

The Wedding March took three years to make. Some say 200, some say 62 reels of film were completed by ugly Erich von Stroheim, Director, Star, Co-Author. His suggestion that the picture be cut so that it could be seen in halves, on two successive evenings, or in a third and two-third division like Eugene O’Neill’s play Strange Interlude was vetoed by Paramount Co. Shearers sheared the picture to the conventional ten reels, leaving, however, thousands of feet of ceremonial parades, of church-bells ringing, of the shaven-headed director strutting in uniform, smoking cigarets, rolling his eyes and lips, with interjected shots of a bird peeping in an apple tree, a sow suckling its young.

The story concerns a Viennese prince who, sitting on his charger during the parade on Corpus Christi day, falls in love with a peasant girl in the crowd on the sidewalk. He wants to marry her but his family presses him to accept the lame daughter of a manufacturer of cornplasters. The theme of the picture is expressed in the first subtitle: “0 Love! Without Thee Marriage is a Sacrilege and a Mockery.”

To this story, this theme, Mr. von Stroheim brings the single variation of a tragic ending. Spectators come away wondering what the deleted 190 reels could have been about. The ten they had seen suffered badly from lack of pace, from over-accuracy of detail and inaccuracy of character. Possibly in its full length, they thought, the picture might have achieved the clarity of those great and patient novels in which a mass of documentation is the necessary wrapping for a burning wick of spirit. But the spectators doubted it.

Mr. von Stroheim came to Hollywood from Austria in 1914. Onetime officer of Franz Joseph’s palace guard, he gave directors valuable points on military detail, court etiquette, played as valet to princes, then as Hun officer, then himself as a prince. Since 1918 he has been working all the time and has made only five pictures, none of them masterpieces. The money he spent on production, and his habit of taking hundreds of thousands of feet of film which would afterward be cut to two or three thousand has made wary even the most lavish of producers.

Mr. von Stroheim is not rich. Producers have paid him flat sums, not big ones, for each picture, while his actors have profited by long engagements. He makes up his own stories but rarely sets them down; he smokes Shephard cigarets, and while working on a film sleeps only six hours, works night and day extemporizing, deleting. He is now under contract to make a picture Queen Kelly for the Marquise de la Falaise de la Coudraye (Gloria Swanson); a contract which the Marquise is said to be trying to get out of.

The Cameraman. Ice-faced Buster Keaton is a cameraman in love; a cameraman because he is in love with the blue-eyed girl (Marceline Day) who works for a news reel firm. He manages to keep out of the psychopathic ward, although he rides a rumble seat in a rainstorm, grinds the camera crank backward, smashes windows, disturbs police, practices all sorts of slap-stickery.