Word: dialogic
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...Blithe dialog by Rachel Crothers about divorce and remarriage (TIME, MARCH...
...novelist whose wife is unfaithful to him and who finds solace in the love of a girl who has been planted in his house by a gang of crooks, is as complicated as it sounds, yet never quite silly and never vulgar. A drama of manner is intended. The dialog, written by Clare Kummer, is civilized. The settings are beautiful; the cast, bought from the legitimate theatre and including Marguerite Churchill and Kenneth MacKenna, takes pains with its material. The result is tedious because the medium is still too crude for the effect attempted. You sorely miss the old-fashioned...
...Later there are backgrounds offering great chances for photography-the engine shops, a Mississippi flood-but they are presented so conveniently that their importance leaks out of the picture. Chaney redeems himself bringing a Red Cross train over tracks covered with water to a flooded town. There is no dialog but plenty of noise-a monotonous scraping sound no more like the big-bellied voice of a real train than the imitation puffing that any trap-drummer can produce with a pair of wire brushes. Chaney acts well; he even walks in the stiff-shoulder fashion of old trainmen...
...garbled reproduction of it could be wholly untrue. Only by ignoring his real material in favor of claptrap borrowed from other pictures has Director Erie Kenton been able to remove all traces of reality from this story which is told in gasps of silence and badly recorded, preposterously written dialog...
...flaming youth. Also, because the mother, as a nightclub hostess, is in mulatto makeup much of the time. Because the story, de pending mostly on character, is a strong one, because the background is unusually well directed, the picture is worth seeing in spite of several long, slow dialog sequences. Best shot: Miss Dresser making the no-good slap her face to impress her daughter...