The return of Abe Potash and Mawruss Perlmutter to London is not an event to be regarded indifferently. The light-hearted pair have evidently been through some anxious times. Rosie Potash can never have been a very easy woman to live with. She has not improved. And now that she has infected Ruth Perlmutter with her morbid jealousies the alert and as yet unbroken Mawruss begins to know something of what his long-suffering, not to say occasionally abject, partner, Abe, has had to endure these many years.
It was bad enough in the dress business. But now they have gone into films it is indefinitely worse. Every reasonable person must know that you can't produce really moving pictures without an immense amount of late office hours, dining and supping out and that sort of thing, a fact which the Rosies and Ruths of this world can't be expected to appreciate. So that it would be as well, think the ingenuous entrepreneurs, if The Fatal Murder were, so far as the ladies' parts are concerned, cast from members of the two households. Besides, what an excellent way of keeping the money in the family. However The Fatal Murder is a dud; Rosie and Ruth are not the right shape; and film acting, with the necessary pep, is not a thing you can just acquire by wishing so.
What is wanted, says the voluble young hustler in the firm, who alone seems to know anything of the business, is real actresses as distinguished from members of the directors' families, and above all a good vampire. A vampire is the very immoral and under-dressed type of woman that wrecks hearts and homes, and without which no film with a high moral purpose is conceivable. You must have shadows to throw up the light. And on this principle all the uplift and moral instruction of that potent instrument of grace, the cinematograph, is based—a fact which will not have escaped the notice of cinema-goers.
When Rita Sismondi appears in an evil Futurist black-and-white gown by Viola you can tell at once she is the goods. But naturally Abe's first thought is, "What will Rosie say?" His second, shared by Mawruss: "Hang Rosie! We shall both like this lady." Finances are not flourishing, but the crooked manager of the very unbusinesslike bank that is financing the P. and P. Film Co. harbours designs on the virtue of Rita, who has this commodity in a measure unusual with film vampires (or usual, I forget which), and is just a slightly adventurous prude out for a good time. He accordingly advances more money for The Guilty Dollar on condition that Rita be engaged, and yet more money on condition that she be not fired by any machinations of jealous wives.
Rosie, indeed, says a good deal when she turns up at a rehearsal and finds the vampire clad in the third of a gown hazardously suspended on her gracious shoulders by bead straps, and Mawruss and Abe demonstrating how in their opinion the kissing scenes should be conducted so as to make a really notable production. However, the vampire's film vices make the success of the company, and her private virtues bring all to a happy ending.
The story need hardly concern us. It is not plausible, which matters nothing at all. Mr. YORKE and Mr. LEONARD are the essential outfit, and it seems to me they are better than ever. One simply has to laugh, louder and oftener than is seemly for a self-respecting Englishman. No doubt their authors, Messrs. GLASS and GOODMAN, give them plenty of good things to say, but it is the astonishing finish and precision of their technique which make their work so pleasant to watch. If it throws into awkward relief the amateurishness of some of their associates that can't be helped. Miss VERA GORDON'S Rosie is a good performance, and Miss JULIA BRUNS, the vampire, seemed to me to make with considerable skill and subtlety a real character (within the limits allowed by the farcical nature of the scheme) out of what might easily have been uninvitingly crude.
T.
OUR FRIEND THE FISH.
"What is a sardine?" was a question much before the Courts some few years ago, not unprofitably for certain gentlemen wearing silk, and the correct solution I never heard; but I can supply, from personal observation, one answer to the query, and that is, "An essential ingredient in London humour." For without this small but sapid fish—whatever he may really be, whether denizen of the Sardinian sea, immature Cornish pilchard, or mere plebeian sprat well oiled—numbers of our fellow-men and fellow-women, with all the will in the world, might never raise a laugh. As it is, thanks to his habit of lying in excessive compression within his tin tabernacle, and the prevalence in these congested days of too many passengers on the Tubes, on the Underground and in the omnibuses, whoever would publicly remove gravity has but to set up the sardine comparison and be rewarded.