Word: unreality
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...penchant for divorces was the subject of a novel (The Children) by Edith Wharton which this picture reproduces faithfully. Mrs. Wharton's professional, knowingly maternal sympathy, her bookish characters, even the glossy feeling of her style, are in The Marriage Playground. It is handsomely staged, conscientiously acted, unreal, inane. Numerous precocious stage children do their specialties as Mary Brian, the oldest and best-looking of the family, gives them their cues. Silliest shot: the cocktail council on the beach...
...Commodore Marries. There is a theory, generally despised, that reality has nothing to do with bread and butter, and that if a man calls his house a ship and gets up in the night to reef his unreal sails against a storm he may still be less mad than most men and better off. Such a man was Commodore Trunnion...
...experiment. The principals-Jack Oakie and Betty Compson-are experienced film actors; the plot, involving jealousy in a song-and-kiss troupe, is the main staple of the current season. The tunes are like hundreds of other tunes you've heard, and the fantastic lives, childish problems, and unreal reactions of the characters belong to a type familiar to cinema-seers since 1910. A girl from one of those Graustarkian Balkan kingdoms changes the destinies of the boys from the jazz orchestra who find her penniless in a U. S. city. Only good shots: the orchestral quartet putting...
...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. At times he gets into the unreal story the dramatic flavor of its background. Best shot: Chaney feeling the driving-pinions, worn smooth by thousands of miles on the road, of his old engine dismantled in the shops. Charming Sinners (Paramount). Believing, probably correctly, that flattery is a persuasive form of entertainment, producers are presenting with increasing...
...Parade was fine for a couple of reels until the old hokum began to stick out. This picture is like The Big Parade in the way some of the battle scenes are handled, but except when mechanical explosions give it energy it is an entirely unreal lyric about a Southern girl who had two sweethearts, one of whom turned out to be a coward. He was drunk when the bugle blew, and when she told him to get out and join the ranks he belched in her pretty face...