The Play and Screen

...Belasco's recent productions have no modern equal...

...Belasco has been producing recently are far more nauseating in their hypocrisy than in any other single feature...

...Both playwrights and actors are benefiting from the change...

...The incomparable little Beryl Mercer plays her foster-mother, and Lew Ayres does a most clean-cut job as the thoughtless Hugh Fullerton...

...But he does have an undoubted and large gift for meticulous production details, and his age and pseudoclerical garb unquestionably throw around his work the illusion of the dignified artist...

...Belasco still has the chance to meet the younger and finer moderns on their own ground and to show what his power can do when bent to the service of honest art...

...Seniority is too apt to become associated with senility to make mere age of any honest importance...

...Tully Marshall as Yates, Ellen's pompous lawyer, shows what a really excellent and complete character actor he is...

...Hale Hamilton is also suprisingly good as Judge Filson...

...The general formula seems to be, "if Belasco can get away with this kind of thing, so can we...

...The history of Broadway is replete with instances of depressing or nauseating plays whose genesis can be traced to the Belasco workshop...

...This condition being granted, Robert poses as a professional dancing partner, meets his might-be fiancee under this guise, and proceeds to the serious business of trying to seduce her...

...It is nothing short of a crime against his own gifts and talents to waste them on rubbish, as he is now doing...

...That ending is further postponed, however, by a lengthy scene hanging on the question of whether or not Roxy is wearing any clothes underneath a certain velvet wrap...

...But for sheer consistency in disguising the most cynical thoughts or the most blatant displays under the mantle of dramatic art and the headgear of morality, and for the wastage of real talent to this end, Mr...

...In this case, it is necessary to go into such details of the plot simply to establish the point I wish to make—that plays of the type Mr...

...The "moral" of this sweet tale comes in the fact that the verbally very modern Roxy Hartley proves never to have been kissed and to be very gentle and understanding in her refusals—thus inciting Robert to theatrical remorse and permitting a happy ending...

...Belasco was careful to assure himself that a "moral" ending or a tragic retribution or some such sugar should establish a sweet alibi against criticism—in all, that is, except the Bachelor Father, which perhaps sought its fancied innocence in the fact that all the wickedness was ancient history...

...The most recent Belasco contraption is just another story emitting theoretical sweetness and light in a heavy atmosphere of seduction and cynicism...

...In all of these plays Mr...

...His position is one of some responsibility...

...In the Fox production, Constance Bennett takes the part of the unfortunate Ellen Neal, playing forcefully and well and with good restraint...

...Needless to say, it turns out that she is wearing a beautiful evening dress—so that the theatrical and deliberate nature of the "stunt" simply adds to the rank hypocrisy of the entire proceeding...

...The movies are heading for better days when they learn the drawing power of simple, well constructed plays as against heavily romantic tales or attempts to rival Ziegfeld...

...The inclusion of dialogue, of course, is bringing about a vast change in public taste, and increasing the selective judgment with which people patronize the motion picture houses...

...At least thirty plays of the average season are worse in details of speech or action than Mr...

...The profligate son, Robert, of Lord George Hampton (British ex-ambassador to France) refuses to settle down and marry the girl of his father's choice until he has been granted a month in which to prove that she will not yield to him without benefit of clergy...

...Belasco has few peers as a showman, and few equals as a director and producer...

...Belasco's products...

...And, of course, the copies are apt to be a few degrees worse than the original—except that they are franker in their vulgarity and less hypocritical...

...More's the pity, then, that there habitually oozes from his workshop a stream of hypocritical slime which the Broadway gang hasten to put into their own bottles and sell later in the season as exotic theatrical perfume...

...It is not so very long since Ladies of the Evening reproduced with keen fidelity the mechanics of the street walker's trade...

...The plot, of course, is not particularly novel in general character...

...In the time that remains to him, Mr...

...The sow's ear constantly wiggles within the silk purse...

...The descendents of this series of plays are easy to recognize in the trash that clutters about half the Broadway theatres during the season...

...It has become his specialty of recent years to open the season sometime in August, and so, by inference or example, to set the pace for other less exalted and less superlatively gifted producers...

...But in spite of this, Common Clay rings with honesty and sincerity...

...Common Clay THE business of transferring good plays to the talking screen goes on merrily, and seldom with better average success than in the case of Cleves Kinkead's Harvard prize play, Common Clay...

...It belongs to that group of stories which depend on a strong "situation" rather than painstaking character study—the type in which the big trial lawyer turns out to be the father of the girl he is attacking on the witness stand, and in which the sins of the rich are paraded as being of even darker hue than those of the middle and poorer classes...

...When Jed Harris can show us an exquisite production of Uncle Vanya, when Eva Le Gallienne can illuminate the recesses of Romeo and Juliet, when the Guild can give us a Wings over Europe or a Hotel Universe, and when a Journey's End can cast its spell over an entire city, there is no shred of defense left for the application of a Belasco talent to the unmitigated theme of modern girlhood resisting seduction...

...Lulu Belle—or the progress of a Harlem harlot—was another...

...The climax of his effort comes in the cabin of an airplane, well up in the clouds, assisted by cocktails and general remoteness...

...Not that the title of "dean" really means anything...

...It runs pretty much the full gamut, from a brash joke about perverts to an effort by the hero to prove that no young woman can resist his charms and deny him extra-marital privileges...

...He is still, it appears, full of vigor...

...The Bachelor Father—which was a sort of "all's well that ends well" ode to illegitimacy—was a recent example of Belasco "art...

...Mima—a pretended morality play, which spent most of its time delineating the seven deadly sins—was a more anaemic case in point...