Milton Sills — The Exhibitors’ Pride (1924) 🇺🇸
Every once in a while a motion-picture producer sends out a questionnaire to theater owners asking them what draws cash customers to the box office.
“We have a big story, lavish settings, a sensational title, and a popular feminine star. What else do we need to guarantee box-office success?” the communications go. And the answer times without number is, “Milton Sills”.
He is an unfailing magnet in the box office. He isn’t young and he isn’t handsome; he isn’t romantic — by all accepted standards, and he isn’t an exotic foreigner. Furthermore, it is pretty well known that he is happily married.
And yet the girls love Milton Sills. They come in droves to see him. And unlike many another matinee idol, his popularity doesn’t wear out. For three or four years he has been a popular leading man. And since he made his big hit a year ago in “Skin Deep,” he has appeared in ten or a dozen big features, the most prominent of them being Adam’s Rib, “The Spoilers,” and “The Isle of Lost Ships.” There is Viola Dana’s “Good Bad Girl,” and Universal’s “A Lady of Quality” yet to come and already the indefatigable Mr. Sills is at work on Flowing Gold with Anna O. Nilsson.
He is a graduate of the University of Chicago and was for a time instructor there.
His casual conversation is a bit deep for the average person. Once after Betty Compson had been talking to him for about five minutes, one of the jokesmiths of the Lasky studio approached her with a professorial air and demanded to know at once about the nebular hypothesis, the Einstein theory, the creed of Buddha and modern artists’ feeling toward chiaroscuro. Betty, somewhat bewildered, took refuge in, “I don’t know.”
“Oh, come now, you must. You’ve been talking to Milton Sills more than a minute, haven’t you?”
He is so big, and substantial and good-natured that he stands a lot of kidding. One of the favorite jokes of the Lasky lot [Jesse L. Lasky] used to be spreading a rumor that Milton Sills was going to be cast as Gloria Swanson’s father.
He doesn’t just tolerate the jests at his expense. He comes back snappily with a wise crack of his own but it is usually over every one’s head. He can insult people without their knowing it.
But though he is earnest, and perhaps a little solemn in real life according to flapper standards, he can essay hectic rôles successfully on the screen. In fact, certain scenes in “Flaming Youth” would have caused a sensation if the censors hadn’t said “Hot stuff” and cut them out.
His performance will wreak enough havoc as it is.
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Photo by: Bird
Collection: Picture Play Magazine, March 1924