Ora Carew — Smiles that Travel Miles (1917) 🇺🇸

And oh how her smiles do travel — not only miles and miles via the film exchange route, but all the way to the hearts of admirers who are legion.

Let it here and now be noted that one of the truly praiseworthy achievements of the cinema art is the dissemination of optimism and hope throughout the realm of humanity. The deftness with which photoplayers press into service smiles to promote this excellent cause is one of the most pleasing developments in the whole business. Today there are hundreds of artists who are noted for their ability to register cheer-infusing smiles before the camera, and one of these is Ora Carew, who has ingratiated herself without limits in Keystone comedies. True, little Miss Carew is quite unique in many ways. For instance, she has different kinds of smiles for different kinds of occasions. Most of her competitors in smile-trading are either content or forced to be content with one particular brand of smile — a same smile, the only kind of a smile she can muster. But Miss Carew can change the style of her smile impulsively.

This little black-haired, brown-eyed star of the laugh-provoking movies is a most interesting lady too. She is best described as five feet of vivacity and beauty. She is one of the champion conversationalists of the studios, being versed in many subjects outside of her profession. An hour’s chat with her is an hour of solid pleasure without one single boresome second. Womanlike she loves pretty frocks, and as her numerous friends know, she knows how to wear them. Always attired immaculately and always ready to join one she likes in a jolly discussion, she constitutes a girl akin to the much-sought perfect. She possesses a keen sense of humor of which she divests herself invariably with a smile inevitably contagious.

Miss Carew was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, not very many years ago. She was educated there at the Roland Hall Seminary, where she paid far more attention to entertaining than her three R’s, and yet she emerged from school a thoroughly educated girl. Throughout her school career she was noted for her smies and she sent her many girl chums to their homes many miles away with indelible memories of those smiles, too.

Miss Carew’s talent for dancing and her trained voice early gave her a chance to appear in vaudeville to an advantage, and she was well known on all the big variety circuits in “sister” acts, single acts and sketches, and always was she engaged in artistic endeavor which benefited by her smiles and which made other people smile happily. In “between-whiles” she appeared with various dramatic stock companies, and it was during an engagement she had with the Gaiety Stock Company at San Francisco that the longing to act in pictures took her to Los Angeles and secured her the opportunity to act with the Reliance-Majestic concern, now known as the Fine Arts.

Keystone next claimed her, but a business trip to New York took six months from her photoplay career and on her return she played one picture at Culver City and then rejoined the Keystone, where she has done her best work. She has been most successfully starred in some of the brightest and cleverest comedies of the age, and in every one of them one of the outstanding features was the famous Carew smile — the smile that travels so far to lift people out of caverns of gloom such as claim them only to destroy.

During eight months of very active activity under the management of Mack Sennett, the winsome little Miss Carew has appeared in at least seven features which deserve places in the movie hall of fame. These were “Saved by Wireless,” “Love Comet,” “Wings and Wheels,” “A la Cabaret,” “Dollars and Sense,” “Her Circus Knight” and “Skidding Hearts.”

In every single picture here named, one of the things most memorable is the smile of Ora Carew. Oh, what a smile for long-distance traveling.

“I should think a person’s face would hurt if it were kept sober all the time,” Miss Carew says, “I cannot understand why the tendency to smile isn’t so general that a solemn mien would be a rarity. Oh no, don’t argue that it’s the nature of the brute to smile, for smiling can be cultivated together with what it signifies, namely, a sunny disposition, a disposition which can emphatically tell woe to chase itself until it’s so exhausted that it can’t harm anyone.” “Was there ever anything so silly as a frown?” she asks. No, must be the answer of everyone.

Any smile will go a long way towards doing some good. Smiles do travel on or off film. Fans and fanettes can emulate Miss Carew with as much advantage as many photoplayers we know.

—

We all love anything of a new style
So let’s try smiling all of the while.

Ora Carew • Three views of her winsome, little smile

Collection: Photoplay Magazine, October 1917
(The Photo-Play Journal for October, 1917)

—

Ora Carew • Keystone

Collection: Photoplay Magazine, August 1917
(The Photo-Play Journal for August, 1917)