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" The miracle of the Wolves " : Call it propaganda if you will !

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,719961,00.html

The Miracle of the Wolves. France has at last challenged for foreign
cinema honors. With immense pomp, with money said to have been
furnished by the French Government, the people of Paris have started
turning out a series of historical pictures. Call it propaganda if you
will. They expect to sell it to the world under the admission wicket.

This film was the first strip of celluloid ever to be unfurled before
a flame in the Paris Opera. At that occasion, the President of the
Republic was on hand and a monstrous array of notables. Paris
responded to the trumpet and has been flocking subsequently to the
Opera to see about the Wolves.

It is doubtful if America will float in similar endless flocks to the
local production. The gorgeousness of the story has not been
sufficiently reduced to a swiftly rising narrative. Through the
opening reels, the characters are confused. Too many dukes and knights
in armor and around the chess board are inclined to irritate your U.
S. gum-chewer.

Thereafter, the picture jumps to its task, reveals itself as one of
the greatest of the camera spectacles. Carcassonne was borrowed by the
Government to show the seige of the medieval town. If you look in your
histories, you will find the tale--how Jean Hachette, Jeanne d'Arc of
the days of Louis XI, saved the seige of Beauvais. Mingled in the yarn
is a startling wolf attack. All the players were French, many of them
borrowed from the Odeon and Comedie. Some of the technique was
borrowed from the U. S. The wolves were borrowed from Russia. From
this assembly, a vigorous picture has developed-- in spots a great
picture--but one that will cause D. W. Griffith scarcely a grieving
gnash.

The Top of the World, James Kirkwood is invariably solemn and
virtuous. He wins his woman. Usually he is an outdoor soul with all
the calm irresistibility of a brooding oak. He grows, in the present
instance, in Africa. Beside him grows his cousin, a dope fiend and a
very unpleasant individual. Out comes the girl, in love with the
latter. Suicides, hypnotism and a flood are employed to solve the
somewhat reminiscent situation. Mr. Kirkwood plays a double part of
the hero and the bum. Anna Q. Nilsson is the girl.

Salome of the Tenements. The odd contrast of a famed actor and an
unknown player losing and failing respectively is the major item in
this film's interest. The star is Godfrey Tearle (brother of Conway
Tearle), an English actor of the first rank. In pictures, he flattens
out and his personality fades. Opposite him is one Jetta Goudal. In
her first leading part, she quite steals the strength of the picture.
She is small and seems to resemble a combination of Marilyn Miller and
Mary Hay. The picture plays about on the East Side (Manhattan) amid
the slums, and pawnshops. The rich man from uptown marries the poor
girl from Hester Street and the audience has only a fairly good time
watching him do it.

Oh Doctor came from a book by Harry Leon Wilson and, like that earlier
work of his Merton of the Movies, has survived the transformation
sturdily. In fact, it has improved a trifle on the book. It
automatically becomes one of the very funniest features of the spring.
If Billups lives three years, he will inherit' three quarters of a
million. He is doomed to die, so he borrows $100,000 to speed his last
days. Most of the time he is a hypochondriac in a hospital bed. Mary
Astor is his nurse. Their activities are not to be avoided.

Daddy's Gone A-Hunting is adapted from Zoeë Aikens' play of that name.
Daddy was presumably hunting for extra-nuptial affection and had set
out on several expeditions. Mamma therefore began a little trip on her
own account and the censors had a good deal of trouble keeping it all
within the law. Alice Joyce and Percy Marmont did the best they could,
but the story started thin and refused to put on weight.

Learning To Love. Constance Talmadge can be safely awarded the comic
crown among our leading 'ladies. She is, of course, always politely
comic. She does not fire pies; she flirts. In the current flirtation,
she has somewhat fewer narrative devices than usual on which to
sharpen the edges of her talents. She is the endless flirt who finally
finds the man that does not collapse at her first grin. He does, of
course, at her last.

New Lives for Old. When France is at war and the band plays the
Marseillaise, you can hardly help responding. Particularly when the
little dancing girl is foiling the wicked old German spies and saving
her U. S. captain and his whole division. Armistice. Marriage. A lot
of trouble with the folks at home. Betty Compson is a fairly bad
actress, but you cannot help liking parts of the picture.

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