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In the seaside village where such Gaelic trifles properly begin, Paddy Adair (Janet Gaynor) is the younger daughter of an improvident Major (Walter Connolly), who has succeeded in arranging a betrothal between his eldest daughter Eileen (Margaret Lindsay) and handsome Larry Blake (Warner Baxter), who has a Rolls Royce and a yacht. When she learns that Eileen loves not Larry Blake, but a poor boy of the village named Jack Breen, Paddy does her loveable best to break the engagement. She snubs Blake, then flirts with him, finally tells him in plain terms why her sister is marrying him. All this has a good effect. After her father has been kicked to death by one of his horses, Eileen marries Jack Breen. Larry Blake decides that not Eileen but Paddy is his real acushla. persuades her that she loves him also. To this assiduously elfin but capably assembled production, Walter Connolly contributes a few genuine moments—like the one in which, with shamefaced grins at his daughters, Major Adair borrows £3 from Larry to pay for a box of cigars.
In This Day & Age (Paramount), Cecil Blount DeMille addresses himself to two obsolescent problems: 1) the gangster, 2) the younger generation. A director who combines the talents of a burlesque impresario and a soap-box revivalist, he makes the result a noisy and preposterous melange, calculated to arouse squeals of excitement or of ennui, according to the audience's mental age.
In outline, the story concerns the contest between the student body of a small-town high school and a peculiarly childish gangster named Louis Garrett (Charles Bickford). When the gangster shoots a Hebrew tailor for refusing to pay for "protection," the schoolboys indignantly try to find evidence that will convict him. When the gangster shoots a schoolboy whom he finds skulking in his bedroom, the schoolboys form a secret society for revenge. Here Director DeMille, more up to date in method than in ideology, stole a few ideas from Nerofilm's M. Whistling bars from "Yankee Doodle" as a code signal, the members of the secret society creep up on Garrett, gag and bind him with adhesive tape while he is having his shoes shined. A high-school girl (Judith Allen) entertains his bodyguard while the boys take Garrett to a deserted factory, try him in a kangaroo court, exact his confession to both murders by dunking him in a rat-infested well. The conclusion is an amazing scene, presumably a DeMil-lenium, in which the schoolboys parade through the streets singing such songs as "The Old Grey Mare" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" while riding Garrett on a rail to the courthouse.