Maibelle Heikes Justice (1915) 🇺🇸
If Miss Justice spells her first name peculiarly, it isn’t through affectation — she has the right by inheritance, it having come down from an ancestress of the Middle West when that section was as French as Quebec.
She is a daughter of Indiana, a state that seems to feed its youngsters with some kind of royal honey to make them write and sing. She writes in an ambidextrous way for screen or magazine page with good Indianian skill and the Mother State has her name down on her golden list.
The writer had a talk with her during the past week at the home of her aunt, here in New York, about her work and authorship in general. She showed me one of her new scripts, The Friendship of Beaupere. It was merely a straightforward account of what she wanted to put on the screen. She is one of those to whom construction seems to come naturally and can’t understand why anyone who can construct a magazine story can’t think just in action and get an effective story on the screen.
With her, there is no awkward twisting and translating. It is the old story of the special person who has the natural gift for expression in some peculiar way — let others study and think all they can, they will never catch up with the one naturally gifted, who uses any effort at all. One can learn how to write; but to do it easily and keep up the stunt is just a gift. Miss Justice says that ideas are continually knocking at the door. She can’t possibly use them all.
There is authority for the statement that to choose is the greatest nerve wearer known to man. One who has many ideas is always at wits end choosing and the process leaves one tired. There is another truth — a flood of fresh ideas coming in is like food to restore one.
Miss Justice says that when she gets tired she likes to go to grand opera. The orchestration and melodies set a new train of fresh ideas marching through her mind and she comes out of the opera house fresh and renewed. If music and the stirring, broad life of great cities is what she needs today to give her inspiration and keep her in tune, tomorrow she will feel the lure of the windigo and must be off to get new stories from the whispering of the pine trees in the woodlands of Canada.
What she likes best to picture are deep human emotions; the heart-elevating and heart-breaking things. In the cities man lacks space, so he tones down, subdues his feelings and consents to live in a lower key, lest he be destroyed.
Miss Justice [Maibelle Heikes Justice] likes to go to the wild places where she can see great dramatic emotions actually pass across the scenes of real life. In the great Northwest that she pictures so well and truly she finds the air filled with suggestions of the big things and now and then actual life will give her the idea for some picture as it did for The Lure O’ the Windigo. Her idea is to picture human beings as God made them and do it courageously. Actual life produces many raw things. In picturing such, she wants to tell the truth of humanity acting according to its lower animal instincts; but in doing so, by developing at the same time the really human elements, she gets an effect that is not offensive but stimulating to humanity.
Just now she is preparing to spend a few weeks at Los Angeles at the Selig studio, where a series of comedies by her and William Lord Wright are to be produced.
Her best pictures are (by Essanay) A Song in the Dark, The Other Man, The Great Game, The Love of Penelope — (by Selig), The ‘Pay-As-You-Enter’ Man, Etienne of the Glad Heart, The Lure O’ the Windigo, A Splendid Sacrifice, The Post-Impressionists, The College Chaperone and many others. Some of her scripts have been produced by some of the eastern companies, Lubin [Siegmund Lubin] and we understand Vitagraph, have put out a few. She says the Western companies pay better.
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”Back of the Shadows”
Santa Barbara two-reel production which has something to say on the evils of the opium habit.
Reviewed by Margaret I. MacDonald.
In the search for subjects suitable for melodramatic development in film the evil of the dope habit evolves itself into one which is possible in the matter of obtaining startling effects. And if handled properly it serves more than a merely commercial purpose, for rarely, if ever, has a picture treating of this subject failed to present it in a revolting form, thereby serving as a warning against possible temptation.
William Robert Daly has produced this picture with Fritzi Brunette. Edward Alexander and Jack Prescott playing the principal roles. The story which is partly in dream form, a fact which has been very cleverly kept from the audience until close to the finish of the picture, is a good one; and it is somewhat of a relief to find that the unpleasant and rather gruesome facts presented are in most part the conception of a dream. In the production Fritzi Brunette has ample opportunity for the display of her gifts of dramatic interpretation, portraying, as she does, three distinct periods of a woman’s life.
At the opening of the story Doctor Alexander and his wife, with their child of four or five years, are living happily. One day a dope-fiend entering the house finds his way to the room of the Chinese cook, and left alone with some opium and a pipe, he falls asleep and the bed takes fire. Here a timely criticism might be offered, for the doctor and his wife, rushing to the scene, carry the man downstairs to safety before making any attempt to extinguish the flames, after which the fire is easily dampened and smothered out.
In the Chinaman’s room the doctor, of course, discovers the drug, and carrying it downstairs places it carelessly on his library table, where it attracts the attention of his wife, who smells it, tastes it, and finally eats it, with the result that later she is found lying unconscious on the floor.
Just where reality ends and the dream commences is somewhat of a problem, but, however, the wife forgiven by her husband and started off on the right road again, evidently dreams of the vengeance of the Chinaman through which she is lured by means of the drug to an opium den prescribed to be exclusively for women.
Here, of course, she enters the clutches of an evil gang of Chinamen, and closely following the happening in the den, she is pictured to be, years later, an outcast from the place, finally ending in prison scarcely recognizable as her former self.
Then the dream merges again into reality, after being accidentally located in prison by a grown-up edition of her little daughter, and we are glad, indeed, to come suddenly face to face with the fact that it was all a dream.
The production is not by any means without its faults, but unlike many others that could be named, it at least lives up to its title, and is not easily forgotten. It will be released through the Kriterion Service.
Scene from Back of the Shadows (Kriterion).
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More Universal Players.
Princess Hassan of Egypt, Neal Burns, Hank Mann and Alan Holubar have been added to the growing list of leading players of the Universal.
Collection: Moving Picture World, March 1915