Exceptional Photoplays Volume 1-4 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1921 Excerpt: ...yet who is her one balm for living, the happiness that lies for him, and for which he yearns, beyond the ring of mountains that constricts her people to their lives of drabness and near tragedy. She is successful in doing this, but only after she has sold the lives of her three older sons--worthless swine--to the "revenuers" in order to obtain the money that will enable Tommy, the youngest, to escape with the little mountain girl who loves him, and who is about to be thrust into a marriage with his lecherous eldest brother, Lem. Here is a theme of mother-love such as a director could unashamedly put forth. Mr. Brabin, using Emily Fitzroy as Maw Toliiver, has done a portrait to be remembered--a great chunk of a woman beaten to the hardness of granite, in whom soft glows come almost like pain. But for Tommy he has used an actor who, if he used him at all, should have been handled more skillfully to suppress his physical disqualifications for the part. Charles E. Mack, with his melancholy dimple, is unfortunately cast and, thrown in contact with the heroic figure of Miss Fitzroy's mother, he often weakens that character's effect, forces upon it an emotionalism which it does not possess, and generally makes it more difficult for realism to hold up its head. Only in such complete pictures in still composition as that where mother and son stand with their backs to the camera, with the mountains in the distance rising before their eyes, are their mutual pain and their feeling for each other adequately and entrancingly expressed. But the photoplay is so full of splendid things like this--pictures that reveal its characters' minds, pictures that tell their lives in classic sharpness--that to dwell on Continueden felt 2) Exceptional Pictures Reviewed in thi...