Cinema * THE CRIMSON PLAYGOER * Drama

For three or four years now there has been a perpetual caravan of actors trekking the plains from Broadway to Hollywood, exchanging all the comforts of civilized drama for the barbarous and uncertain hazards of the Sierra cinema. Concerning these new pictures a theory has been noised about, which makes their aim not so much the immediate gold of the West as fame which will redound to their profit on their return to the legitimate. This is supposed, by tipsters of this school, to have been Katharine Hepburn's true reason for entering the movies, and now that "Jezebel" appears, Miriam Hopkins' also. For, although most who know her name would not recall it, Miss Hopkins has been in nine or ten New York hits before her career in celluloid started. Among these were "Lysistrata," "The Affairs of Anatol," "The Camel Through The Needle's Eye," and "John Ferguson." Unfortunately it cannot be said that either the Hopkins or the Hepburn reputation will be greatly increased by their present reappearances on the stage. In the first case, the fault lies mainly with the vehicle; with Katharine Hepburn one is inclined to say that it goes deeper.

At any rate, "Jezebel" is a play too deadly to allow any actress of talent unqualified success. The author is Owen Davis, and his perception of life has not changed much since "Nellie, The Beautiful Cloak Model." In "Jezebel" he digs out all the old props of Southern melodrama, with the most perfunctory dusting-off, and recombines them in a fashion which the more debased minds might consider "modern." Undoubtedly he had hold of two or three good dramatic ideas when he started, but he ruins them all by psychological flummery. The close of the second scene of the second act, when Jezebel dances and sings in triumph over the death of her enemy, would have been a really great moment if it had been properly led up to. Even the last scene would have been no such triumph of unverisimilitude if Davis had made General Rand more of a Southern gentleman and less a brutal hospital interne. As to the motivation of Jezebel herself, it seems fantastic. Such a woman, if her lover married another one, would be more tempted to win him back than to murder him. Even if she decided on homicide instead of adultery would a Southern gentleman say to her. "You ARE a bitch."

A catalogue of the dramatic relies which compose this play would include; the aging and virgin aunt with a frustrated youth, the very Louisianian young blade, with a hot temper, a sense of honor, and a complete faith in the economic and political future of the South, the plague of yellow fever as a fearful background, the duel, the darkies and pickaninnies, the decayed family, and finally, the deserted mansion. But Davis is not true to the romance of "swords and roses"; he fumbles a little psychopathology into the plot, and his play quavers ridiculously for two acts between Eugene O'Neill and a minstrel show. At the last the dying hero is borne out on a litter, while an offstage chorus chants "Oh, Lord, Ah'm comin'" or some like air.

Miss Hopkins, really the only one in the cast who does anything but walk about and strike attitudes, draws all that could be drawn out of this hodgepodge. It has, at best, a dark effectiveness, which she makes the most of: in the dinner table scene, in the bacchic moment of her triumph, in the resolution of hers and her lover's destinies in the end. Helen Claire, who plays her rival, sets off her unscrupulous cleverness for the best effect. Truly she makes a fine, sinister Jezebel, and if a beautiful wicked and elevah woman has any attraction for you at all, you will enjoy her acting despite its dramatic occasion.