Cinema: The New Pictures Jan. 19, 1925

Her Night of Romance. Constance Talmadge does not perform very often. It is just and eminently fitting that when she does she selects a good sustaining menu of amusement. Such a menu is the present film. It is all light food, thin and made for laughter. Arriving in England is an American heiress to $10,000,000. Starving in England at the same time is Lord Menford. To frighten off the wolf, Lord Menford sells to this heiress his estate, “catches a bun” the next night and is delivered to his ancient gates. Thereupon they are marooned together for two nights and a day. Woven through this inconsequential thesis is a variety of vigorous by-play and device. Miss Talmadge is excellent as usual and is aided immensely in her pantomime by the brilliant support supplied by Ronald Colman. Director Sidney Franklin has done a neatly knit and thoroughly ingenious job.

If I marry Again sounds like one of those pulpy domestic morals with which the jaded directors are so fond of fabling. That is just what it is. The message is a domestic warning to males. Confide in your wife, it counsels. Tell her all your troubles and your problems. Tell her a joke now and then. All this is demonstrated through the medium of a cabaret girl who married an earnest youth and got on amiably with him despite her inconspicuous beginnings. Another, more propitious, marriage in the picture crumbled because the principals were partners but not companions. Doris Kenyon helps matters along with a serviceable emotional performance.

Locked Doors. Youth (Betty Compson) married to simple senility (Theodore Roberts) falls in love with a young and handsome hero (Theodor von Eltiz). This happens by the side of a trout stream in romantic circumstances that just escape being obvious. From the viewpoint of technique the story gets worse and worse. A red-hot flatiron sets fire to the house at midnight, and, as if this were not ridiculous enough, the young lovers, saying protracted good-byes in the lady’s bedroom, persist in arguing as the flames sweep around them. There is the usual insipid ending—divorce and the marriage of the perfectly mated.