Ladies Must Dress. After repulsing the improper advances of her employer's son, a shopgirl (Virginia Valli) marries the honest poor boy whom she has captivated with her girl friend's sartorial assistance. This merry plot is a frayed and apparently accidental ribbon tied to the wrist of a fashion show.
The Devil Dancer, in the remote stamping ground of the lamas,* is not a native Mongolian but the child of an unfortunate white woman. She, Takla, on reaching maturity, is discovered by an English explorer who takes her rapidly away to India. Here Takla is not a success. Her social value becomes so low that the sister of the explorer, hearing that he intends to marry his discovery, has her kidnapped by an immoral blackman. Only the extraordinary resourcefulness of the scenario writer makes it possible for Takla to evade both the unpleasant death being prepared for her in the lama monastery and the imminent misconduct of her kidnapper. A glad conclusion becomes, thus, inevitable and the picture stops. Famed Gilda Gray, whose name has always been a synonym for that improper motion of the body, the shimmy, is to be seen whirling about in the innocuous curves of the devil dance. While she is not dancing, she makes no effort to wriggle out of her responsibilities. Whenever, in the course of the plot, she is called upon for a momentary snatch of acting, she is competent. Her well-shaped shoulders support a weak story and expensively featureless directing. The dusty hills and mountains of darkest Tibet are spectacular but they are not, one suspects, very far far from Southern California. Actress Gilda Gray was born in Poland to a poor man named Michelsky. He named his daughter Mariana, emigrated to New Jersey, worked hard in a packing plant. Mariana grew up to marry a bartender who was also a bad character; when she left him, she got a job at $8 a week singing in sawdust floored saloons. From that point her story is merely the brief, trite, magnificent U. S. epic of success. Someone who watched her dancing detected a charm that had nothing in common with Pavlova's grace, or with the sweeping symmetry of Isadora Duncan, or with the stereotyped but enticing flections practised now on musical comedy stages by the Duncan Sisters. When Mariana Michelsky sang her songs in the honkytonks, the cheap sports stopped talking and stared at her with the impudence fading out of their faces. A few years later, called Gilda Gray by that time, she went into the Ziegfeld Follies in Manhattan. Since then she has toured the U. S., acted in cinemas, allowed her husband, Gil Boag (against whom she has recently filed charges in a suit for divorce), to advertise her as well as any woman has ever been advertised.