The Play and the Screen

...And between "at last" and "again" there is all the deep gulf that you find between novelty and habit, between enthusiasm and criticism...

...In spite of several excellent numbers and the considerable personal glamor of Beatrice Lillie, Gertrude Lawrence, Jack Buchanan and Herbert Mundin, the trouble seems-to be this year that the review is still simple but forgets to scintillate...

...But a great change has taken place in a year...

...There is also less of the winds of cleanliness blowing around the Chariot stage this year, more of the cheap suggestiveness borrowed from Broadway, and a decided falling off in musical vivacity...

...Now we say "They are back again...

...Only hardened theatregoers of New York could understand the complexity of emotions that caused New York to clasp the first Chariot's to its arms...

...104 THE COMMONWEAL December 2, 1925 THE PLAY AND THE SCREEN By R. DANA SKINNER The New Chariot Review THEY are back again—meaning, of course, that quartette of English artists who last year taught New York its best lesson in how to make a review scintillating though simple...

...The School for Scandal LAST year the Neighborhood Playhouse indulged in a revival of Sheridan's The Critic...

...Antonta 'T^HERE is nothing in this story of a former prima donna, A who after ten years of married life in the country returns to Budapest for one romantic evening, which particularly recommends it to the intelligent playgoer...

...In fact the Neighborhood revival of The Critic was signally innocuous...

...To prove the further charge of inverted morality, it is only necessary to recall that we have all this mess of divorce and unnecessary renunciation based on the sole motive of social and material advancement for the daughter...

...With Mrs...

...The management would—by a little thought—have sensed the fatal obviousness in Jack Buchanan's scene, Buying a Hat...

...But apparently it did not...

...But the cynical wit of this generation of English comedies is a rather depressing quantity at best and exacts the utmost refinement and skill in acting to give it that purely artificial remoteness demanded by effective satire...

...Everyone, including the author, seems to think it right and a matter of course that souls should be tortured and twisted, mother and daughter wrenched apart, and the selfishness of the second wife gratified to the sole end of marrying the daughter to an eligible young man who is too much of a snob to marry her while she still lives with her mother...

...It would have understood that when Fanny Brice and Albert Carroll have already given us two radically different and equally brilliant parodies of Pavlowa, even Beatrice Lillie can not make a Russian ballet burlesque surpassingly novel or funny...

...That, however, would have meant no book and no feature film—wherefore the charge of insincerity...

...It seems to me (not having read the book) that this story is about as artificial, cynical and insincere as any I have seen on the screen...

...Here and there throughout its wandering length are scattered some really superb bits of acting and direction—scenes which, taken by themselves, are poignant, honest and executed with a rare delicacy of feeling...

...Insull as Lady Teazle exhibiting only one gesture for all occasions, with no one in the cast displaying adequate diction, and with a general lassitude in direction, there is nothing to make this School for Scandal stimulating...

...If the Chariot management had better understood the basis for last years acclaim, it would, I am sure, have put more effort into sharpening the wit and humor and subtlety of the present show...

...Marjorie Rambeau, as Antonia, portrays an interesting conflict in this woman's mind between the call to romance and excitement on the one hand, and the restraining force of an impregnable common sense on the other...

...It is one of those plays in which the technically moral ending is obviously a sugar coating poured on at the last minute after the playwright has had his full fling at intrigue and pseudo-romance...

...It is, it may be granted, a fair character study...

...You can advise your friends to save their ticket money for next year when Chariot's may happily have returned to its pristine cleanliness, grace, sprightliness and wit...

...New York had grown tired of lavish display, of glorified and dumb young ladies parading the stage in impossible postures and costumes, of comedians whose comedy had reached the high blood pressure age, of artificially renovated jazz, of occasional good talent swept back to the dressing rooms before one could settle down to enjoy it...

...It is supposed to rest on the selfsacrifice of a mother who finds that her own vulgarity is so great a handicap to her daughter's social advancement that she turns over this daughter to her husband's second wife, after facilitating a divorce and otherwise choosing in every single case the most difficult and heartrending course...

...The whole story would explode in smoke if either Stella's own daughter or the second wife had been thoughtful enough to tell the poor woman that the chief mark of her vulgarity was her overdressing and her needless aggressiveness...

...Perhaps last year's success came too easily...

...And if the daughter were one-half as intelligent and adorable a creature as she is supposed to be, or if the second wife were one-half as generous and intuitive as the captions say she is (and incidentally, not quite so determined to have Stella's husband for herself) then this simpler solution would be not only plausible but the only possible one...

...Miss Rambeau's acting in it is far too good to be wasted on so insincere a bit of hokum...

...But this should not blind people of average common sense—even actors who naturally admire skilful interpretation for its own sake—to the inverted morality and the sheer stupidity of the plot and its theme...

...or the maudlin dreariness of his apache song Gigolette...

...Sheridan, as revived nowadays, is considerably less offensive than Congreve...

...It would have been so vastly easier for Stella to have dressed in quiet black and held her tongue in public than to go through the self inflicted agonies which occupy most of the film...

...A year ago we exclaimed, "Here at last are real artists and entertainers...

...Ziegfeld and Dillingham may still be glorifying roundly to tried and true audiences, but the Shuberts have graduated into light opera with male choruses that can sing, the home grown brand of small and intimate review has bounded in popularity, and the second Chariot's finds itself facing not only native competition but also the far more subtle competition of its own first and gallant effort...

...In short, New York was ready for something so old that it was new...

...These good English visitors may not have realized that they thrived as much on the monotonous demerits of New York reviewdom as on the intrinsic worth of their own program...

...Messrs...

...Stella Dallas JUST why the story of Stella Dallas as shown in the Henry King "picturization" should win encomiums from such a range of theatrical personages as Ethel Barrymore to Douglas Fairbanks is rather hard to discover...

...The story is much too long to detail, and, like all artificial ones, far too complex...

...Of course it goes without saying that within the limits of the stunts assigned to them, the four chief entertainers are far above the average...

...In it you found sparkle, exuberance and just the right degree of crisp artificiality...

...The present production is pretty pictorially, but it distinctly lacks those elements which furnish the sole excuse for reviving this particular classic...

...But in a review the stunt's the thing...

...And the first Chariot's landed here at just that moment to be uproariously greeted by just that mood...

...It would have realized that Gertrude Lawrence's Russian Blues is no adequate successor to last year's Limehouse Blues, and that a barber chair burlesque has, to say the least, been done before...

...Its quality of satire is lost, and only its cynicism and fine clothes remain...

...It might well have served as a model for the Druce and Street revival of The School for Scandal...

...This much I will say for the film—it has brought into glorious prominence one Lois Moran, who, as Laurel, the daughter, does as fine, as sensitive, as versatile and as honest a piece of acting as I have ever seen on the screen...

...But the situations and the motivations are nearly all forced and artificial...