Cinema -:- THE CRIMSON PLAYGOER -:- Drama

Norma Shearer in her latest opus now playing at the University adds another quite substantial rung to her ladder of success. Her acting and other natural endowments add considerable to a plot that is slightly drab to speak mildly. What is more, she is one of the few women who is able to wear a hat as if it were an ornament rather than a necessary excrescence, and the remainder of her attire is correspondingly satisfactory. The major point is, however, that she plays her part as if she were an actress and not a model.

The plot is one of sophisticated, talkie, married life with the usual innuendoes of too many cocktails before dinner and infidelity. In spite of this apparent handicap, Professor Hays seems to have been cajoled into allowing this picture to be shown in an intelligible state. Rare as the case may be, the result is a sort of problem drama with as little of the usual attending motion picture sugar coating that could be hoped for. Good acting, good directing and a good script by pure geometrical reason go together to make a good picture.

As for the other picture on the bill, it is frank and undisguised drivel. The only exciting part is a prolonged scene in which the wife, Helen Twelvetrees, attempts to inform her husband that she is going to have a child. She discourses at length on the beauties of the park, looks ethereal and at last departs in high dudgeon because hubby just will not take the hint. At last by dint of rubbing his nose in some yarn, and announcing that his wife is going to ******, an Irish wardrobe mistress gets across the idea. All goes to show the blushing naivete of a picture that should never have been thrust on the hard, sophisticated world.