"The Story Without a Name." Reported as a prize story, this picture causes chiefly astonishment. It is about as good a picture as the next one but why prizes were presented is obscure. It seizes upon the popular death-ray plot, abducts the U. S. inventor and his heroine under the auspices of a sinister foreign power, and saves them by courtesy of the U. S. Navy in time to preserve the death-ray secret. Agnes Ayres, Antonio Moreno and the dented nose of Louis Wolheim are among those higherup in the cast.
Dante's Inferno. Dore rather than Dante was the libretto employed for this extraordinary study of home life in hell. All the writhing agonies of the Dore decorations are transplanted and pricked with pins to make them wriggle. Showers of fire, bubbling pitch, blood-stained harpies are industriously pitch-forked together for the discomfiture of most of the prominent sinners of History. It is all supposed to be the dream of a very wicked business man who fell asleep over a copy of Dante. Except for sinners who have the misfortune to be selfconscious, the film is respectfully recommended.
Her Love Story. Gloria Swanson's latest contains only a mild amount of drama but a good deal of Gloria Swanson and will therefore automatically acquire a million or more dollars. Mary Robert Rinehart wrote this one on the sound old theme of the Princess who loved the commoner. Against a purple background of mustachios and gold lace, Miss Swanson again demonstrates that she is quite properly one of the greater figures in the current cinema.
Three Women. The three women are Pauline Frederick, May McAvoy, and Marie Prevost. Pauline is 38 and looking around pretty anxiously for a little affection. May, her daughter, marries it right under her nose and Marie lures it rapidly away. It is Lew Cody. The unseen hand of Ernest Lubitsch pulls the strings for these popular puppets and makes them dance acceptably.
His Hour. Ever since Three Weeks was written, the public has furtively expected bright red adventures from the pen of Elinor Glyn. Again she presents the pink pills of platitude. Somewhere in Russia a pre-War prince corners an English girl in a lonely cabin. She pulls a gun on him and they hold the pose for hours. When she finally faints from exhaustion, he gets cold feet or kind heart and carries her off to Petrograd to buy a license.