She Made The World Ween

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 24, 29 January 1938, Page 7 (Supplement)

She Made The World Ween

WERE the feminine tears loosed during performances of Lillian Gish in her 15 years on the silent screen funneled into a single channel, it's not unreasonable to believe that the resultant river might well have approximated the Ganges, the Nile or the Mississippi. Before the screen became noisy, Miss Gish was heralded as its Duse, and inasmuch as the silent pictures knew nothing of the harriers of language her repute surpassed in its universal scope that of the Garbos, the Lombards, the Dietricbe, the Crawfords and the Ix>y« who have flowered since the screen started to talk. Miss Gish to-day is acting (in a topbilling role) with Burgess Meredith, of "Winterset" fame, in the New York stage play, "The Star-Wagon." She was surprised recently to meet a young Cuban who has been writing monthly lettere to her for 17 years, ever since as a boy of 12 he saw her on a Havana screen in "Broken Blossoms." Two years ago Miss Gish had proof of the appeal of the eilent picture. On a holiday jaunt with her sister Dorothy, she found herself one afternoon before a hut on the Albanian frontier. The woman who presided over this household was barefoot, etoutish, and her black dress was girdled by a stout rope about her waist. \o picture theatre was to be found within miles of this mountainous waste, yet the woman recojrnised Miss Gish immediately. Years before, the Catholic prieet who presided over the community had thought that his parishioners might see a moving demonstration of an article of their faith in "The White Sister," which Miss Gish made in 1923. So lie brought a print of the pieture and a projection machine on an ox. And this Albanian peasant woman cried tears of joy in recognition. Ephemeral, unreal, wistful, fragile, these were the adjectives with which Miss Gish was most frequently described during her heyday on the screen. As a Pittsburgh critic recently wrote of her when she appeared there in "The StarWagon:" —"There was about her an aura of mystery which even Garbo cannot match —for Garbo now talks on the screen and the Gieh of those days was, mute and ever so lovely.' We saw her and the delightful 'unrealness' of her wa* not shattered by the sound of a voice."

Tf Miss Gi<h paused oceans of (ears to lie shed, slip alwo set up hox-oHice records that remained untouched to this day. "The IJirtli of n Nation." which cost a bare i>l.ooo dollars, had profits in the millions, and still turns in handsome sums in revivals the world over. Xo Gish picture over a period of 15 years—l:l yearn that saw her in "Broken Blossoms," "Hearts of the World,"

"Orphans of the Storm, ,, "Way Down I'r.st," and "The White Sister"—ever played to less than a million dollars— and million-dollar pictures are now rare enough to set up great publicity in Hollywood. "The Birth of a Nation." still rated by many competent critics as the' finest motion picture ever made, was a trailbreaker in more ways than one. It was the first picture to play at two dollars on Broadway and the first to enjoy a run of any considerable length. * It played for 47 weeks at the. Liberty Theatre in West Forty-Second Street,

•where its profits -were 500,000 dollars, this a day when the motion picture vu> regarded as something little better than a peep-show and when 10 and 15 cents ■«■»« the visual price of admission. On its first presentation it was one of the longest pictures ever made —it ran two hours and 4."> minutes, in 12 reels —and destroyed the theory, popular until then, that pictures were but a stop-gap in a variety programme.