Harry Handworth Out of Excelsior (1915) 🇺🇸

Company has not yet selected successor for former president and producer.

Formal announcement is made that Harry Handworth, president and producer of the Excelsior Film Company, last week resigned from the company. William H. Wright, treasurer of the Excelsior, and the representative of the financial interests behind the company, said on Wednesday that Mr. Handworth’s successor had not yet been chosen, but that in all probability the election of two members of the board of directors would be taken up this week, and that, following the selection of a president, choice would be made of a producer.

Mr. Handworth was one of the organizers of the Excelsior last February. The company has put on the market pictures that established the position of the concern right from the first. Some of the subjects Mr. Handworth has directed are The Toll of Mammon, The Path Forbidden, When Fate Leads Trump and In the Shadow, which have been or will be released on the Alliance program. Mr. Handworth is a writer of scripts as well as a successful adapter. His skill in the technique of production was shown in The Pathfinder, where he accomplished the camera feat of showing Octavia Handworth in double exposure passing to herself and receiving in synchronim a letter, cards, packages and clothes. Mr. Handworth was for many years one of the prominent producers of the Pathé studios in Jersey City.

When seen at the Screen Club this week Mr. Handworth said that he had as yet made no arrangements for the future.

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“The Girl of the Golden West”

One-time dramatic success produced in pictures by the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Co.

Reviewed by W. Stephen Bush.

Those who have seen this great American classic with Frank Keenan as the Sheriff and Blanche Walsh in the part of the Girl, will be disposed to turn a severely critical eye on a film adaptation of the play. I am glad to be able to assure them at once that Theodore Roberts does not lag an inch behind Keenan’s impressive performance and that Mabel Van Buren is a most acceptable substitute for Blanche Walsh. In the part of Ramerrez the “road agent,” House Peters has surpassed himself. In appearance, in manners, in histrionic power, in the subtleties of characterization this artist was the beau ideal of the modern Robin Hood of the West.

The extraordinary success of the play on the speaking stage was due to many causes, every one of which will equally operate in favor of the filmed version. In the first place the play is of the virile American type, whose appeal to our audiences will always be irresistible, its dramatic construction is singularly free from flaws, the atmosphere comes upon us conventional mortals of the East like a storm from the mountain tops, the scenery is the best and the most picturesque in all California. There is another element of strength and popularity in the play which does not lie on the surface but which deserves the attention of the exhibitor. In The Girl of the Golden West we ardently sympathize with every one of the principal characters. The girl who has preserved her maidenly modesty in the riotous saloon of the frontier, the “road agent,” whom the simple faith and love of the girl converts into a gentleman in the rough, the big-hearted sheriff, a keen sportsman and always “on the square” endowed with a sense of honor as sensitive as that of any cavalier — these are types which will forever charm and delight us. It stands to reason that the screen excels the stage in one of the great essentials of this play: Scenery.

The story on the screen has the background, which it needs to make it perfect in all respects. Some one with the eye of a playwright and a landscape painter selected the exteriors. The interiors are all good, a rare thing in a play of this kind. One of the strongest points in the play was the climax; it comes swiftly and withal logically, it is a real culmination of all that has gone before and it rouses the emotions of the audience to the highest pitch. The climax on the screen has most of these elements of strength.

The Girl of the Golden West is truly one of the chef d’oeuvres of the Lasky Company and it will, I have no doubt, be a source of pride and profit to every exhibitor who can show it.

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Scene from The Girl of the Golden West (Lasky)

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Vitagraph Theatre Program

The program for the week of January 10 at the Vitagraph Theatre, Forty-fourth street and Broadway, New York, will include a three-part dramatic appeal for the relief of Widowed Mothers, a measure that will be urged at the forthcoming session of the New York legislature. This subject was reviewed at length on page 52 of the issue of January 2, 1915. Other pictures to be shown are: The Hair of Her Head, Chiefly Concerning Males and A Mix-Up in Dress Suit Cases. A Nocturne in A Flat, a one-act dramatic sketch, will enter upon its second week.

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Sleepy Eye Not So Sleepy, After All

Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, a town of 2,000 population, is anything but so somnolent as its name would indicate. At least it boasts one exhibitor who is thoroughly wide awake in the person of Mr. J. B. McNeil, manager of the Opera House, who last week contracted for George Kleine’s Quo Vadis, Spartacus, The Naked Truth, Savage and Tiger, Lion of Venice and European Armies in Action. Mr. McNeil will show these attractions to Sleepy Eye at admission prices of ten and twenty cents, except Quo Vadis? which will play at fifteen and twenty-five cents. All of which goes to show that the national supply of “progressiveness” has not yet been cornered by the Broadway film capitalists. Mr. McNeil is certainly to be congratulated upon his enterprise and far-sightedness.

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Blackwell Fighting Disease

The English government is curiously paternal in the conduct of its colonies, and, in cases of native disease, supplies the physical wants of the sufferers, as well as administering the governmental business of the provinces. In the stress of fever camps, and under the press of emergencies arising from widespread and devastating plagues, to which all tropical countries are subjected at times, medical attention is often difficult to procure, and fever camps are often placed under the control of civil authorities. It is to such a fever camp that Carlyle Blackwell, in the role of Donald Gordon, in The Last Chapter, returns to the tropical land which he has learned to love during his sojourn as an explorer, on a previous trip. The black natives of Central Africa place implicit confidence in their white protectors, and learn to love and obey them with a dog-like devotion.

All of the above is clearly shown in many striking views of African kraals in The Last Chapter, and the tropical atmosphere of these scenes forms a strange contrast to the luxurious civilization of the scenes laid in both England and America.

Collection: Moving Picture World, January 1915