Serenade (Adolphe Menjou). It is curious that the cinema, an industry only recently become civilized, should already have produced the rarest and most delicate flower of decadent aristocracy, an example of supreme elegance. It would be unfair to say that Dandy Menjou is an actor as well as an example. All his roles are the same; he wears fine clothes to hide his scrawny shanks; he gets all his effects by raising one corner of his triangular mustaches, by flipping one hand in a small arc to indicate either the tremendous futility of life or his willingness to marry a rich & beautiful woman. In Serenade he impersonates a young composer who, in the flush of success, takes advantage of his wife's good nature. After she retaliates by taking advantage of his credulity, gently implying the presence of a lover where no lover exists, the last fadeout shows his boots and her slippers nestling together outside the door of their room. The events leading up to the reconciliation have the glitter and charm, thinned somewhat by a mediocre medium, of the writings of Arthur Schnitzler. Even as an orchestra conductor, a profession of which one is led to suspect he understands not even the rudiments, Dandy Menjou is suave enough mentally and facially to make the street sheiks, when they leave the theatre, light their cheap cigarets with an uncouth and elaborate imitation of his gesture.
Honeymoon Hate is essentially The Taming of the Shrew relieved of its light-hearted ribaldry and trimmed instead with lavish gondolic romance. Florence Vidor is charming enough, as she storms gently at her insistently regal husband, to impart some flavor to the insipid story.
London After Midnight gives Lon Chaney another opportunity to make his face even more threatening and unpleasant than usual. He does this because he is a highly efficient Scotland Yard detective on the trail of grave-walking, werewolfish murderers who haunt a house near London. The rest must remain a mystery; as such, it is well worth squirming about.
Helen of Troy is a legend whose life has passed, like an old coat, from king to courtier, from courtier to servant, from servant to beggar. Homer wrote about a fine and glittering lady; Marlowe found lines like golden bells, for a casual queen; John Erskine made the legend into a matrimonial farce, and now the matrimonial farce has become a cinema, played against Maxfield Parrish walls and valleys, by Maria Corda, a pretty little blonde girl with an affected way of showing her teeth.
Immortalized by a great poet, modernized by a clever man, vulgarized by the First National Pictures, Inc., it would be natural to suppose that the old coat could now be no more than a shred of dishonored beauty. This is not accurate. Far from beautiful, seldom even witty, The Private Life of Helen of Troy manages to enrapture most of the people who watch it by its simple and consistent formula. A wisecrack when uttered by a mythical king is ten times funnier than the same wisecrack offered by a drugstore cowboy.