Cinema: The New Pictures Dec. 10, 1928

The Masks of the Devil. Author Henry James in parentheses, Playwright Eugene O'Neill in asides, made their characters utter their real thoughts during conventional dialog, a device awkward in fiction or on the stage but natural and effective in the many pictures which have contained hints of it. Used here to great extent, the trick adds interest to Jacob Wassermann's short story about the Baron (John Gilbert) who has the face of an archangel, the soul of a devil, and a lust for the fiancee (Eva Von Berne) of his friend. In an effort to live up to his reputation as the greatest lover in Hollywood, John Gilbert makes his eyes pop out and his chest heave in a way that little furthers his ambition to be also its greatest actor.

John Gilbert has been connected with the theatre all his life. With his mother, an actress, he grew up in road-shows, later filled inkwells for a San Francisco rubber company, played in stock and finally in a picture, The Snob. Mary Pickford gave him his first big part (Heart of the Hills). In 1918 he married a girl who put on an act in his base-camp; later they were divorced. He married Leatrice Joy in 1921; they were divorced. He has a 92-ft. schooner called The Temptress, drives a Packard, plays tennis fairly well, golf badly, is careful with his money and reads Shakespeare. He dislikes romantic roles and thinks the best picture he ever played in was The Big Parade.

The Viking. Although the odd, no-colored daylight of the camera suggests, by the contrast of shadows, all colors, producers have always been dissatisfied with this virtue of their medium just as with the swift possibilities of its silence. Past experiments with color have been unsatisfactory principally because colors did not reproduce exactly; in this tinted drama involving an English slave and a Viking Princess, the old trouble continues —blue is not blue, brown not brown. Melodramatic episodes of Norse swordplay, and voyaging ships give an old-fashioned atmosphere to a story that could not have been exciting even if it were more intelligently directed. Best shot: the discoverer of America* going ashore at Newport, R. I.

The Somme, made with the co-operation of the British Army Council, is a war picture without plot, a rapid newsreel of the fighting that went on in the mud and rain in 1916 and 1917. Unlike those recent films of battle in which the courage and good-nature of the protagonists made war seem a rather admirable, phenomenal cradle of heroes, The Somme is full of death and terror, last cigarets puffed on the ground, bodies, the conquered and the conquering, piled indifferently together. Best shot: a lonely piper, making death musical for a Canadian regiment.