Cinema: The New Pictures Aug. 18, 1924

Janice Meredith, Paul Revere is watching the Old North Belfry, Washington is crossing the Delaware, and America is running the Revolution over again these nights; all for the greater glory of the Cosmopolitan Motion Picture Co. What is more, Paul, Washington and America are doing it exceptionally well.

From the foregoing it can be gathered that Janice Meredith is primarily a slice of American history. It is served between heavily buttered slices of romance. Romance must inevitably seem heavily buttered in such violent contact with reality. Yet it makes good motion pictures. Accordingly it will survive and flourish.

The Romance is told of a Colonial bond servant who becomes George Washington's nearest and dearest colonel. The daughter of the Tory family to whom he was indentured turns Rebel. Between them, they win the war. Conveniently, he happens to be of noble English birth. Conveniently, when he is captured she rides to Washington with the dispatches. Later, a shell drops on the British firing squad as they are sighting the whites of his eyes. As Romance the play has all modern conveniences.

Marion Davies plays the title role. She is the worst of a thoroughly excellent cast. Specially satisfactory was Harrison Ford's hero, Maclyn Arbuckle's Tory father, and W. C. Field's gorgeous comedy as the drunken British sergeant.

There are those who agitate boisterously about the unquestionable excellence of the Delaware and Lexington episodes. There are also those who comment favorably upon the brilliant accompanying score of Deems Taylor. But to at least one witness the finest single detail was the charm, fidelity and taste of the successor of exquisite Colonial architectural interiors.

Monsieur Beaucaire. There has been a general proposition floating around for a long time that you cannot argue with a woman. There is a fact quite absolute that you cannot argue with a woman about Rodolph Valentino. He is beautiful, and he harrows the heart. Since women compose the vast majority of cinema customers, criticism of Rodolph seems futile business. Nevertheless:

Rodolph returns to the screen in a generally excellent version of Booth Tarkington's romantic tale of France and England in the days of Louis XV. How he impersonated the ambassador's barber; was thrown out of polite society; regained his introduction by detecting an English duke with an ace in his sleeve; was betrayed, and won the great duel, is familiar fiction. These elements of the production are vigorously invested. A softly padded introduction at the French court drags. Audiences are advised to come a half-hour late for the maximum effect.

It seems the producers were worried lest the public might think Rodolph's vitality had been vitiated by his having been so long buried in beauty clay. Therefore they stripped him to the waist for several minutes and let him play Lionel Strongfort. Also, they let him go on talking out of the side of his mouth for masculine effect. Otherwise he was sane, suave, and at moments scintillating.

With the exception of Bebe Daniels, the cast is shrewdly chosen, and includes Lois Wilson, Flora Finch, Lowell Sherman.