Word: elissa
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Devil's Lottery (Fox). Simultaneously last week were released Elissa Landi's third novel and her fifth cinema. She had reason to be pleased with both. The book, House for Sale (Doubleday, Doran ?$2.00) is a competent study of a female musician who gave up her career in favor of matrimony and three children. No brilliant achievement for a professional novelist, it is probably the best fiction ever perpetrated by a cinemactress. The picture, Devil's Lottery, less sensational than The Yellow Ticket in which she last performed, is a glib and interesting melodrama in which Miss Landi performs...
...generally supposed, the cinema has an important influence upon the behavior of cinemaddicts, there will presently be a large increase in the total number of U. S. strumpets. Norma Shearer, Constance Bennett, Elissa Landi, Helen Hayes, Claudette Colbert, Tallulah Bankhead, Evelyn Brent, Greta Garbo, Ruth Chatterton, Marlene Dietrich and Genevieve Tobin have all in recent pictures attractively performed functions ranging from noble prostitution to carefree concupiscence. A Free Soul, Strangers May Kiss, Susan Lenox: Her Fall & Rise, Once a Lady, Morocco, Body & Soul, An American Tragedy, The Sin of Madelon Claudet, My Sin, The Smiling Lieutenant, Born to Love prove...
...Plan, U. S. producers often display Russia, most frequently pre-revolution Russia, as a hobgoblin empire in which misery had plenty of company and none of the inhabitants was more than one step removed from the Siberian salt-mines. The Yellow Ticket, an estimable antiquity, full of perils for Elissa Landi, shows what might have happened in old Russia when a young girl took it into her head to pay a visit to her convict father...
...junket are imminent until she makes good friends with a British journalist (Laurence Olivier) and, by virtue of what she can tell him about the technique of the secret police, becomes his secretary. When the journalist's revelations imperil his life, there occurs the scene in which Elissa Landi, imprisoned in the Baron's chambers, is informed by him that "we must all make sacrifices for those we love." Every heroine's Samaritanism has some limits. Elissa Landi shoots the Baron, escapes with the journalist in the opportune confusion caused by the first...
This grim but lively melodrama, even more than her earlier vehicles (Always Goodby, Wicked) shows the potentialities of Elissa Landi as an emotional actress. A stage success of 17 years ago, the picture has two other noteworthy performances?by Laurence Olivier, a mild spoken English actor with unusually good camera presence, and Lionel Barrymore. Barrymore, the best leerer in his family, achieves facial contortions of unparalleled eloquence; he has added a scratchy guffaw to his paraphernalia of lechery. Good shot: the scene in a cabaret in which a song sung by the performers reminds Barrymore where he first saw Elissa...