CRIMSON PLAYGOER

It is a pleasure to find the Cohens and Kellys back in Hollywood. May they stay there henceforth and allow the picture now playing at R.K.O. Keith's to be their farewell appearance. These good people flourished in the days of "Abie's Irish Rose" but they are past their prime now.

The story is concerned with the rise in filmland first of the Kellys through the efforts of the daughter Kitty through the efforts of the daughter Kitty (June Clyde) as an actress and then of the Cohens when the son Melville becomes a theme song writer. The Kellys, as nouveaux riches, fancy themselves disgraced by the Cohens, who follow them to Hollywood. Miss Edna May Oliver could do this to perfection but the Kellys merely blunder through in their usual way, while Kitty, in the pursuit of her art, makes burlesque melodramas for which there is no apparent reason except to prove that almost any moving picture could be worse than it is.

The talking pictures put an end, as well they might, to Kitty's career, mean while enabling the Cohens to take over the Kelly studio, the Kelly butler, and many of the Kelly airs. Kitty undergoes a miraculous change of heart which seems appropriate enough to the Hollywood atmosphere and permits a reconciliation with Melville only after the Cohens too have lost their money and the two families return home together.

It would be easy to point to the flaws in Messrs. Sidney and Murray, but there are still those who like them and the rest of the world will not go to see them anyway. Still, they are on the downgrade.