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Menelaos shakes hands with his subjects and, by stentorian snoring and an overemphasized case of hay-fever, blows his wife away. Once gone, she realizes that a statue is not an idol unless it has clay feet; and that men are always either snoring or boring. This cultural advance is accomplished with a great pounding of subtitles, and a cast whose gait is not always, but usually, smooth and rapid. Among its members are Lewis Stone as Menelaos and Ricardo Cortez as a sultry but persuasive Paris. Now We're in the Air. Wallace Berry and Raymond Hatton have for some time been in the throes of a series of adventures as difficult if not quite so herioc as those in which the Rover Boys once acquitted themselves. Bouncing about this time from clouds to shell-torn battlefields, their misfortunes are ridiculous enough to be laughable. Most laughable is a scene, perhaps the most vulgar ever photographed, in which the two are impersonating the front and hind legs of a cow—a cow which is naturally incapable of the functions most commonly associated with its kind. It must be admitted that Funnyman Berry is about ten times funnier than his partner and that the canny reluctance to state the name of the opponents of the French, English and U. S. Troops in the late War adds little to the suspense. Home Made. Johnny Hines, pretending he is a man pretending to be a railroad porter, meets a pretty girl. Then afterward, pretending not to be a restaurant waiter, he bluffs his way to financial and marital success. None of this is nearly as funny as it is intended to be.
The Valley of the Giants. Through the gloom cast by enormous forests and the fact that the girl he loves is the niece of the man who is cutting down his father's trees, Bryce Cardigan (Milton Sills) staggers, twisting his face with the effort of carrying too much drama for any three cinemas. Doris Kenyon, as the girl he loves, though nice to look at, cannot give him much help.
Explosion is about two men, one a villain, one a hero, who want the same girl. The hero gets her. Like all German films, this one has bright sparks of photographic realism, lighting in this case the smoky darkness of a coal mine. But these sparks flicker and die along the grey and interminable fuse of the story which leads, at last, to a nonexplosive climax.
French Dressing, no matter how generously poured over Lois Wilson and H. B. Warner, should have at least a dash of the sharp subtlety of vinegar. Lacking this the other ingredients, though orthodox and not unpalatable, become somewhat spiritless. In this case they are a marital quarrel, a soupçon of extra-marital jealousy, a sudden but not surprising beautification of the wife, and, a bad last, the reconciliation which leaves her in charge of a quiescent situation.