The Rainmaker (William Collier Jr., Georgia Hale, Ernest Torrence). Behind this attractive title blooms only a fair film. It is a story of a jockey—called the rainmaker because he was a weather prophet—a onetime girl of the dance halls, and the old toothpick chewer who owns the dance hall. The toothpick chewer loses the girl to the jockey. Pounded in to stir the nerves are an epidemic, a fire and, naturally, a heavy flood of rain.
Why Girls Go Back Home (Patsy Ruth Miller, Clive Brook). They probably do not. But this one did. She was not more than 20 minutes on her way when the handsome youth appeared down the aisle of the train to make her succeeding years rather less lonely. She had met him when he was an actor in a vagrant troupe of hams. She followed him to Manhattan and made the acquaintance of a few hard facts. All this makes comparatively commendable entertainment.
Silence (H. B. Warner). It has long been a mystery why H. B. Warner was not gobbled by the movies. This onetime Alias Jimmy Valentine is one of the best of legitimate actors. He has played films before but never with conspicuous success. The pictures have not been up to his acting. So great a success has he made in this one that he will be lost to the stage for the next three years, on contract in California.
At that, Silence is not so much of a picture. It is a melodrama involving a man accused of murder, snatched from the death chair, shielding another, a faithful girl— and all that. Good enough, and an indication of excellent pictures forthcoming from H. B. Warner.
Wet Paint (Raymond Griffith). In this picture plot has been taken quietly by the hand and pushed over a precipice. Mr. Griffith starts by making love to a gunman's wife, is surprised by the husband and terrified by his artillery. The rest of the picture is the old movies comedy-chase. Mr. Griffith drives a fire truck through heavily populated streets, invades a Turkish bath. These things are, as always, funny.
Aloma of the South Seas. Gilda Gray, graduate of barroom dance halls of the Middle West, has made her first picture. She has taken a grass-skirt story of a native girl in love with a visiting American. After various struggles with his girl from America and Aloma's coffee-colored lover, it turns out, miraculously, that she is really a white girl after all. Miss Gray, while no Bernhardt, holds up her end of the acting capably enough. She also shimmies boldly and with emphasis. That, after all, is her life work and the thing she seems to do with more attractive violence than anyone else in the world.