Cinema: The New Pictures Oct. 20, 1924

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Tarnish. When $70,000 changed masters for the screen rights to Gilbert Emery's play, savants of the celluloid wondered. What would the censors say?

The film is out; and the censors are silent. So discerning was the craftsmanship that most of the original weathered the storm. The story, in case one's memory has blind spots, tells of an earnest youth whose wild oats flourish forth at the feet of his fiancée. The moral is that all men are tarnished; it is woman's task to select a husband that cleans easily. May McAvoy and Marie Prevost occupy themselves to good effect as the fiancée and the wild oats. The picture is to be recommended, but not with banners and hysteria.

The Navigator. Buster Keaton is like President Coolidge. You either like him or you do not. If you are one of the latter, you will stay away from the box-office polls. Otherwise, you will watch him on shipboard, attacked by cannibals, prodded by swordfish. You will continue happily in his constituency.

Roaring Rails is virtually a flashback. It returns to the days when all that was necessary for a vast success was a good train wreck and a knock-down-drag-out fight (in which the villain was knocked and dragged). There was also a girl and, usually, a dynamite job under the canyon bridge. Roaring Rails has all of these plus a small section of the World War. The hero is a locomotive engineer. People who are burdened with deep intelligence are cautioned not to ride behind him.

Dangerous Money. Bebe Daniels has been projected into another orgy of spending. She starts in love and poverty, inherits a fortune and goes away to an "exclusive school for young ladies"—one of those magnificent cinema schools where the girls wear curls down their backs and continually wander about bearing tennis rackets. From there, she shifts to Italy and is learning to drink just as her Irish sweetheart, who has left his construction gang to save her, arrives and orders beer.

The Story Without a Name. Reeking of radio, rum and romance, this production defied baptism. Tony Moreno offers a flowing tie and horn-rimmed spectacles as evidence that he is the inventor of a death ray projector. Immediately he is put upon by the devious treachery of foreign agents.