New STYLES in SCREEN GIRLS – By Harry Carr (1926)
New STYLES in SCREEN GIRLS – By Harry Carr (1926)
Motion Picture Classic – 1926
New STYLES in SCREEN GIRLS – By Harry Carr
Harry Carr says that the fashions in film heroines have changed as often as the vogue in shoes and gowns. Mr. Carr divides the girl cycles as follows:
The Mary Pickford.
The Lillian Gish.
The Pola Negri.
The Gloria Swanson.
The peppy, unrestrained type of 1926.
‘The next raging sensation of the screen was the Lillian Gish kind.
She didn’t really start a cult like Mary. But she started a technique. Even to this day, I very rarely see a big emotional picture that I do not trace back some of the stuff to this or that play of Lillian Gish. That futile beating of the hands on the locked door. That spasmodic clutching of the throat. That maimed twitching of the lips. Perhaps it unconscious on Miss Murray’s part; but the pitiful movement of the corners of her mouth as she lay broken hearted on the bed in “The Merry Widow” was taken directly from Lillian Gish’s death scene in “Broken Blossoms.”
It was so like it that I half expected to see Dick Barthelmess come in, dressed in Chinese clothes. Some girls have tried to copy Lillian’s funny of running around in circles; but nobody has ever been able to get away with that except Lillian herself; and even she doesn’t always. She says she got the idea from the fact that animals, when overjoyed, all run around in furious circles to show their joy.
Lillian did not start a cult because there weren’t anymore Lillians. Now that I think of it, however, I observe that three of the most popular women ever seen on the screen have had no imitators. They stand alone.
They are Pola Negri, Gloria Swanson and Lillian Gish.
Oddly enough, it happens that these three are devotedly admired by other actresses. The most passionate “fans” I have ever known are movie girls themselves. They follow Mary Pickford around the street and step on each other’s feet standing in the lobbies at her previews—just like other girls.
Three Stars With No Imitators
They are little Pola Negri gangs; little Swansons gangs and Gish gangs. They burn incense before one or the other of these; but they do not try to imitate them.
You might as well try to imitate Yosemite Valley or a storm at sea as Pola. She is as much a thing apart as the smell of mountain sage, or the flash of sea phosphorus. She is just Pola; that’s all.
It is impossible for anyone to be like Gloria; because Gloria is a strange combination of the exotic with the downright practical. Just when you decide that Gloria is a cafeteria cashier stepping out, you suddenly change your mind and decide she is the Queen of Sheba come back to life. No one knows well enough where one begins and the other ends ever to make as much as an attempt to imitate the lady.
Just so, nobody knows what the real Lillian Gish behind the technique is like, well enough to imitate her. So none of these ever created a cult. The next cults that came along were the Norma Shearers and the Corinne Griffiths. They brought a new note. The aristocratic air. They frankly upstaged us; they ritzed us. They had a little the air of “You can look; but mustn’t touch.”
And how we loved it!
Harry Carr – 1926
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