‘An Innocent Magdalene’ at The Liberty (Marysville Daily Appeal 1916)

 

‘An Innocent Magdalene’ at The Liberty (Marysville Daily Appeal 1916)

  • Marysville Daily Appeal, Volume CXIII, Number 74, 26 September 1916
  • THE LIBERTY

Lillian Gish, the famous and beautiful moving picture star will appear tonight for the last time at the Liberty theater in ‘An Innocent Magdalene.” Mere Man has just has another thrill. He has just had an advance glimpse of “An Innocent Magdalene,” in which Lillian Gish is starring on the Triangle programme, and knows about a whole lot of other new fashions. He watched very carefully, because he wants to tell his wife all about them. “Listen, Penelope,” he says to his wife which he makes swimming motions with his hands; “Lillian had one gown that was some pippin. At a distance, you’d swear it was put on her by a concrete mixer.

An Innocent Magdalene 1916 Lillian Gish l

No matter which way she turns, you can’t see any joints in it. It looks to me as though it was made with one long ribbon wound around her until one end comes under her left ear and other comes just above her right ankle. There are ruffles and ruffles and then some—built, I should judge, on the principle of the Ashokan watershed. Another cuckoo that she wears before the second reel is over, hasn’t a darn bit of decoration on it except a fal-lal —or a fol-de-rol, or some sort of flimsy shawl arrangement with daisies splotched all over it. If it wasn’t for that, I’d say the style of it was the period of the flood because I used to have women dressed like that in my Noah’s Ark when I was a kid: and if it wasn’t for the shoulded-straps on the funny thing, the period would be set still earlier. It is a thrilling story.

An Innocent Magdalene 1916 Lillian Gish k

It is an appealing story and the treatment is nothing if it is not delicate and artistic. Allan Dwan had a splendidly constructed scenario to work from and an intelligent cast to work with. The director himself rose to the occasion and the result is “An Innocent Magdalene,” a picture of rare charm. It is a picture which creates and sustains a real and artistic illusion. Roy Sumerville wrote the scenario from the story by Granville Warwick. Lillian Gish probably never had better opportunities and probably for that very reason never gave such an impressive characteri ation, and she along with Sam de Grasse and Spottiswoode Aitken and others in the cast compels admiration.

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