Word: besting
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Clara Bow gets the kiss in the fadeout. She is a better actress than her usual It-girl role would lead you to expect, but in most of her scenes she is not trying to act so much as to suggest, rather over-consciously, how "cute" she is. Best shot: Kay Francis in front of a bedroom door...
...star dancer to replace her with his Chinese kitchen maid. The rivalry of the two girls winds up with a dagger-fight between them in the rooms of Anna May Wong. Like most English pictures, the drama is crudely shaped and conventionally directed. Anna May Wong does the best acting. Gilda Gray does not have much chance to dance. The best shots are incidental ones of sinister little streets in Limehouse and Soho...
...Oppressed (French). Never at her best even in the comparative intimacy of a theatre because she needs a smaller place, a cabaret where she can count on every inflection of her face and voice, Raquel Meller acts like a phantom for the camera's phantom audience. Her gestures are uncertain and stylized, yet she does not seem to be a phantom of herself but of some other actress, perhaps Bernhardt, perhaps Duse. Bernhardt made a cinema 17 years ago that was a good deal like this.* It was a costume drama too, and even with the experimental craftsmanship...
Other folly-stoopers in the story are Aunt Agatha, still mourning in a third-story back bedroom because she was "betrayed by a Southern gentleman who moved in the best circles but was married already"; and Mrs. Dalrymple, divorced for infidelity. She "looked as much like a king's mistress as if she had stepped straight out of profane history, had been obliged to seek moral climes more congenial in profligate Europe...
Perhaps the best indication of the change can be seen in the shift of the spotlight from pitchers to batters. Once upon a time small boys wanted to grow up and be like Pitchers Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson. Now they want to grow up and be like Hitters George Herman ("Babe") Ruth or Rogers Hornsby...