DRAMA CRIMSON PLAYGOER INTERVIEW

From the limbo of crazy plots and hysterical melodrama, D.W. Griffith has brought "That Royle Girl" and just why he has done it is still open to doubt. Supposing that Mr. Griffith is still capable of another "Birth of a Nation," it might be well for him to hunt around for a story. As it is he has gone to work with W.C. Fields, Carol Dempster and a lot of wind machines. It may be even possible that the wind machines were borrowed from other sets, because it seems impossible that a normal supply could create such a fiendish storm. Mr. Griffith doesn't content himself with a mere cyclone; he has to have three or four tornadoes going on at the same time. Of course when you have over half the cast to kill off at the end you might just as well blow them to pieces as drown them or burn them. We're beginning to wonder why a Griffith cyclone wasn't used in place of the Great Flood by whoever was in charge.

Here we are well into the second paragraph and we haven't said a serious word about Miss Dempster yet. She escaped from a Mary Pickford tendency to fight in the streets early in the picture, and acted with reasonable sanity and dignity from then on. She is really too lovely altogether to go clowning all over the screen with such a master of the jongoleur's art as W.C. Fields. Fields, by the way, contributes his own blundering broad-faced type of humor which this department has always enjoyed enormously. It is to be regretted that he falls on and off the screen comparatively few times.

Whereas the melodramatic rapidly of the picture is forgivable, we cannot possibly pardon Mr. Griffith for those idle moments of sentimentality when he tried to make up for all the nasty things he thought about Abraham Lincoln during the making of "The Birth of a Nation." Not that we are against sentiment as a general rule--oh, dear no--but this was almost maudlin.

In spite of all the better things we have said about "That Royle Girl," it really isn't bad entertainment. Mr. Griffith is doing stunts for his audience, and if the story is jerky, and the action too rapid at times, there is still the beautiful and clever Miss Dempster, to make up for other failings. As we have intimated above, she would be a great actress if she stopped trying to be cute.