Word: castings
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Hearts in Dixie. First of several Negro cinemas scheduled for imminent release, this picture has only one white actor in its cast-Richard Carlyle, who plays a doctor. Spirituals, nicely sung, occur, as advertised, 30 times in the hour and ten minutes Hearts in Dixie takes to run. The voodoo doings, the cotton pickings and Bible-shoutings are just what a certain class of people, educated to consider Negro life "colorful" and "primitive" expect of the race, just as people of another class expect vaudeville patter and tap-dancing. The pathos, based upon the low temperature of the ground enclosing...
...honest show, the action moves ahead faster and faster through beautifully dovetailed sequences to a climax in which the spieler, armed with a tent stake, fights his way out of a battle with a mob of "rubes." Fred Kohler, Alan Hale, graceful Renee Adoree and a competent minor cast replace with simple, effective acting the sentimentality common to this type of picture. Best shot: the quiet, sinister mob jostling in the midway...
...Girl on the Barge (Universal). A director with more interest in his material and with a better cast could have made a fine picture out of a hard-drinking, Scotch barge-captain's opposition to his daughter's romance with a deckhand. Indifferent, however, to life spun out in slow journeys up and down canals, or perhaps discouraged by Actress Sally O'Neill's coyness and Actor Malcolm MacGregor's self-possession, the producers of this picture combine mediocre photography with choppy storytelling. Worst shot: studio tank vexed by a wind-machine to indicate...
...place among the stars. She played opposite Walter Hampden in his U. S. debut (The Comtesse Coquette) in 1907. Followed several years of triumph in the U. S. and on the Continent. Then cinema claimed her, then vaudeville. Miss Le Gallienne persuaded her last year to join the cast for The Cherry Orchard and she bloomed again, unfaded...
...stand up at all the play demands the lightest touch in the acting. This it does not receive, except from two members of the cast, Cecile Dixon and J. M. Kerrigan. The others are so conscious of the whimsy with which they are dealing that it vanishes in their eager hands. This is particularly true of Mary Ellis and in a lesser degree of Basil Sydney. However, not even heavy performances can completely weigh down ebullient dialog. There are worse places in life than Pooh Corner...