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He was in San Francisco waiting to sail for Australia with Willie Collier and a road company of The Dictator when the 1906 earthquake occurred. Having spent the previous night away from home unexpectedly, he had nothing to put on but a full dress suit. In the bewildered, terrified crowds in the street he met Enrico Caruso and Diamond Jim Brady. They took back to New York the story that Barrymore had "dressed" for the earth quake. The commander of a local U. S. Army post recruited him to boss a gang of men in reconstruction work. He wrote home a harrowing account of his experiences, asking for funds. When asked if he believed the story, his uncle John Drew said: "I believe every word of it. It took a convulsion of Nature to make him get up, and the U. S. Army to make him go to work." As his success grew, he took acting more seriously. He played Hamlet successfully in England in spite of unfavorable comment from George Bernard Shaw. For a long time he had alternated cinemas with his plays. Four years ago he went to Holly wood permanently. He takes pleasure in insulting film magnates and commenting mockingly on their methods. Cast in The Sea Beast, made from Herman Melville's Moby Dick, he said: "Hollywood will have to invent a love-interest. Should I fall in love with the whale?" Dolores Costello was cast with him. He married her. He often forgets to shave, has worn the same hat ever since arriving in Hollywood, has his clothes sent from London. His best pictures were Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Beau Brummel. Mammy (Warner). It is strange but inescapably true that Al Jolson can sometimes make his kind of song—intrinsically tawdry though it is—sound like a folktune a thousand years old and that he can be funny as well as sentimental. Mammy is as silly as most other Jolson pictures. Irving Berlin, who wrote the tunes, wrote the story too—a backstage triangle with a "mother angle" thrown in to key up the sentiment. Jolson does a drunk scene and sings many times. The tunes are better than some of Berlin's, but not so good as the old favorites Jolson sings again: "Who Paid the Rent for Mrs. Rip Van Winkle?" "The Albany Night Boat," and an even older one, shuffled to by thousands of dancing feet, planged from the banjo hearts of ten thousand nickelodeons— ''Pretty Baby." Most expected shot: Jolson enveloped in the arms of his mother (Louise Dresser) on a station platform.
Hell Harbor (United Artists). Jean Hersholt, the cinema's foremost exponent of a new, modern kind of villainy, a villainy with depth, individuality and something understandable and human about it, is here a German brigand who makes a good living buying and selling the produce of an obscure island in the Caribbean Sea. Among his current deals is one, negotiated with the lady's father, for possession of Lupe Velez. Like Hersholt, Miss Velez has a specialty in her acting: she is a professional Latin spitfire. Director Henry King, whose specialty is the reproduction of romantic and dangerous backgrounds, has done well with the photography, making the story look a little different as it follows its familiar outlines. John Holland is the gallant American adventurer. Best sound-shot: the stumping, sinister footsteps of a man with a pegleg.