Word: likings
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Freddy is a blinking, fatuous caretaker on the Surrey estate of one Gommery who is busy trying to seduce a London actress. This leaves Mrs. Gommery idle, repressed. She would like to have Caretaker Freddy take care of her. Frightened, as an excuse for leaving, he invents for himself a-mistress in London to whom he must repair. By chance he selects the name of Mr. Gommery's actress. This mock disclosure precipitates an extremely dull, English-accented farce in the P. G. Wodehouse manner but without the Wodehumor. C. Stafford Dickens is playwright and Gommery. Raymond Walburn...
Piccadilly (British). People who liked The Old Wives' Tale may be startled at the idea of Arnold Bennett writing a film for Gilda Gray. And people who liked the Follies of 1922 may think it odd that Shimmy-Dancer Gray would appear in a story by Litterateur Bennett. Yet there is nothing in the collaboration to wonder at. Having made her name with her hips, with increasing maturity Miss Gray now takes acting seriously, while Mr. Bennett, having begun with masterpieces, now writes pamphlets on health, testimonials for advertising and sentimental stories for the Saturday Evening Post. This Gray...
...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...
Artificial Ear. A voice speaks through earphones, a stick like a metal pencil moves by electricity between fingers that lightly hold it, shaping words. By this device, recently perfected by Western Electric and installed by Paramount in 30 seats of its Brooklyn theatre, deaf people can try to make sense of talkies...
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...