TWO CRIMES--MORE OR LESS SPLENDID

The Brothers De Mille are competing at the Fenway this week, and for once William who has always been in partial eclipse, surpasses his more famous brother. By this it might appear that "The Splendid Crime" is a splendid picture, which it is not, being merely one of those things which go to fill in the spaces between "The Gold Rush" and "The Merry Widow".

The assertion that Bebe Daniels, who plays the featured part, is of an old Spanish family has always seemed to us to evince a slight touch of quaintness on the part of her publicity agents. It really matters very little who she is or what she is, so long as she is willing to throw herself into character as vigorously as she has done in her last four pictures. We were thinking especially of "Sinners in Heaven", but it might be better not to think of that one, considering the prejudice that naturally arises in favor of swimming pool business in the South Sea Islands.

In the instance of "The Splendid Crime", as in her last venture, "Lovers in Quarantine", she does not hesitate to make herself as unattractive as possible, which is a thing we cannot help but admire. So many, many moving picture actresses, even in these days of good direction, curb their dramatic potentialities by refusing ever to look ugly. We could name half a dozen who continually appear, with the aid of trick photography, as something between an archangel and an artist's model. But, in the long run, tooth enamel, and spot-lights below one's double chin, will never take the place of a desire to act.

Assuredly Miss Daniels, who never stops chewing gum throughout the entire picture, has the ambitions of her profession at heart. Although she falls some-what short of her purpose, she makes "The Splendid Crime" interesting, which it wouldn't have been without her.

For a few precious moments "The Wedding Song", the other picture on the program, showed an excellent grasp of pearl fishing in Pacific waters. Not that we know much about the pearl business, but the boys were going at it in a nice sort of way and were getting up lots of oysters. Nobody was opening them up just then, but everything pointed to a couple of necklaces by sundown, if the cysters crashed through all right.

Unfortunately the story lost itself with the pearl king among a gang of pickpockets and confidence men, posing as a domestic group. Leatrice Joy, known in Hollywood as the woman who divorced Jack Gilbert before he had played in "The Merry Widow", is chief bandit in this picture. Bad as she may have been, it seemed unnecessarily brutal to make her stand by during a cinematic thunderstorm while her brother, and the rest of the cast, took pot-shots at her. But she scrambled bravely up two or three hundred feet of precipice, as advertised, and reached her destination. The native girl did wing her once in the shoulder with a shot gun, but she struggled on and threw the bomb out of dangerous proximity. All this goes to prove that the story deals not in pearls but in cartridges. The one thing we actually liked about the picture was Robert Ames, the unfeatured male lead. He was young enough and attractive enough to aid Miss Joy considerably.