Cinema: The New Pictures Nov. 10, 1930

The Silver Horde (RKO). They are still making films out of Rex Beach’s stories. This one, like the rest, is complicated, violent, highly naive: the nobility of the hero is 100% and so is the villainy of the villains. The theme of the picture is the struggle of opposing interests for control of the Yukon salmon fisheries. It contains a few great sequences: the beautiful silver hordes of fish whirling down the river and lifted, struggling, into the fishing boats out of the heavy nets.

The Virtuous Sin (Paramount). A strange effort toward sophistication in the manner of Sardou, The Virtuous Sin falls between burlesque and melodrama. The plot, one of the silliest of dramatic stencils, concerns a Russian lady who saves her husband from a firing squad by making herself attractive to the General who has ordered his court-martial, only to find that she has fallen in love with the General. The General, acted as well as possible by Walter Huston, is known as “Iron Face.” These are the sins of The Virtuous Sin; its single virtue is that it provides the first important vehicle for the alluring and competent Kay Francis. Best shot: interior of a house of ill-fame patronized by high tsarist military officials.

Feet First (Paramount). To see Harold Lloyd hanging by his toes and fingernails, in attitudes of comic agony and terror, to the abutments of an office building above a busy city street is one of the most exciting things in the modern cinema. It is not, of course, humor that makes crowds roar and shriek as they watch him, but his antics inspire a contraction of the muscles of the diaphragm just as humor does, with the same vocal results. The skyscraper episodes in Feet First are more elaborate than in Safety Last, which he made seven years ago; there are times when even a seasoned Lloyd addict does not want to look at him, as when, having at last reached the top of the building and sniffed a bottle of etherized paint-remover, he reels along a cornice 15 stories from the sidewalk.

But in Feet First he is more than a human fly. Through the first three-quarters of the picture he is funny with his characteristic and workmanlike kind of comedy. He is an ambitious salesman in a Honolulu shoe store who falls in love with a girl whom he takes for an heiress but who is really a private secretary. Fortunately, not much attention is paid to the plot, except as a framework for gags. Such a gag is the sequence in which he makes some light social remarks about a titled Englishwoman whose name happens to be the same as that of a racehorse with which he is familiar. There is a gag with fishcakes and a dog, and a gag with an exploding cigar. Each one is carefully constructed, a little mechanical, but irresistible and in the best Lloyd manner. The theme-line is “Madame, your instep is far too beautiful to be spoiled by a short-vamp shoe.” Feet First takes rank with the best Lloyd shows—Speedy, Safety Last, The Freshman, Welcome Danger.

Harold Lloyd leases his studios and has a complete staff of film-makers on his payroll. Paramount merely distributes his films. It took him four months to make the skyscraper shots in Feet First. Nobody doubles for him in high places. He uses fewer twin-exposure shots than most skeptics would suppose. He is an athletic young man and keeps himself in shape on the private golf course, tennis courts, handball courts, and in the gymnasium of his expansive house. When he is making a climbing comedy his only protection is a platform with mattresses on it, built out from the side of the building a few yards below him. During one shot his brother Gaylord Lloyd, who was watching him, became sick. Harold Lloyd says his next picture will deal with college life.

Kismet (First National Pictures Inc.). Everything that the Warner-controlled First National company might have been expected to do to a play whose principal sets are laid in the Caliph’s harem in Bagdad has been done to Kismet, except one — there is no color. That, from an industrial point of view, is important and interesting, for every sequence might have been built for a color-camera. The Warners have decided that in spite of its tremendous cost color brought in nothing at the box office; for the time being they have stopped using it. The only remaining element that might give interest to Kismet is the able performance of 72-year-old Otis Skinner in the role he first acted 19 years ago. The rest of the players are indifferent and the play itself is pretty well outdated. It contains some fine Turkish architecture and one beauteous shot of girls in the palace swimming pool.