Vola Smith Joins Universal (1916) 🇺🇸

One of the most beautiful young actresses appearing before the camera is Miss Vola Smith, who has been engaged by the Universal Film Manufacturing Company to work opposite Carter De Haven, the well known Broadway star, under the direction of Richard Stanton.

Miss Smith is a native of Buffalo, New York, and for four years was a student of dramatic art, but never appeared upon the professional stage, although she had taken a number of parts in amateur performances.

Two years and a half ago D. W. Griffith engaged her for the Biograph Company and she began work in New York City. Her clever work and pretty face soon brought her leading roles and she appeared in such successes as Two Girls of the Hills and a number of comedies, later playing the featured lead in Lorna Doone, Black Sheep, Captain Fracasse, Masks and Faces and Life’s Stream. Recently she has been working at the West Coast studios of the Biograph Company.

Miss Smith is very young, with good features, big brown eyes, and has a wonderful expression for the screen. Both Stanton and De Haven are congratulating themselves at being able to secure Miss Smith’s services.

“I have no fads but my work,” said Miss Smith. “To me work before the camera is only a pleasure and I look forward to it from day to day and am always studying how I can improve my parts.”

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“Who’s Guilty?” Series Ready

First release scheduled for May 8 — eight installments have been completed and delivered — interesting questions portrayed.

It now is certain that before May 8, the date of release of the first photo-novel in Pathé’s Who’s Guilty? (1916) series, produced by Arrow Film Corporation, at least eight and probably nine of the fourteen photo-novels comprising this series will have been delivered by the producers to Pathé.

This in itself marks a record in photo-play production even for a record-breaking series.

It has made possible the delivery by Pathé to the many newspapers which will run the Who’s Guilty? stories of six complete novels prior to the publication of the first one. Thereby the newspapers have been enabled to give these stories unusually fine space and layouts.

It has been decided to release these pictures in the following sequences: Puppets of Fate, on May 8; The Tight Rein, on May 15; The Tangled Web, on May 22; The Silent Shame, on May 29, and Sowing the Wind, on June 5. These are the first five of the Who’s Guilty? series.

All of these photo-novels are problem plays that present a terrific indictment of certain present-day habits and conventions of society. They are concerned with the moral guilt of the men and women back of those immediately guilty. They are pages of life as it is lived by us all, showing us as creatures of environment and circumstance and caught in the whirlpool of our strenuous existence.

Miss Anna Nilsson and Tom Moore, the co-stars of the Who’s Guilty? series, are seen in a variety of roles that call for the highest histrionic ability. No two of the stories are alike in plot, set, or costume; the result has been to tax to the limit the energies of the players, of Howell Hansel and Lawrence B. McGill, who are directing the Who’s Guilty? stories, and Hickson, the Fifth avenue modiste, who has designed Miss Nilsson’s gowns exclusively for the Who’s Guilty? series.

Puppets of Fate, the first of the series, hinges on the moral and legal right of a surgeon to perform a serious operation on a member of his own family. Medical and surgical ethics frown on such a practice; but there is no legal prevention of it. When the surgeon in Puppets of Fate makes his big mistake it is left to the audience to determine who actually is guilty — the surgeon, his wife, a wealthy widow, who has perhaps over-encouraged his ambitions, a fellow-surgeon, or the latter’s wife.

In the same manner the right of a parent to determine whom his son shall marry is presented in The Tight Rein. Out of the desire of a Puritanical mill owner to weld two fortunes through the mating of his son with another mill owner’s daughter comes a cataclysmic tragedy that affects the son, the daughter, the parents and many others.

In The Tangled Web, the third of the Who’s Guilty? series, there is presented the problem of love versus money, the primal instinct of a woman to possess her husband’s love rather than to be merely the choicest possession his money has brought him. It concerns itself, too, with the validity of a marriage which has been entered into through a fraud perpetrated on one of the contracting parties, an offense for which there is but little legal redress.

The fourth of the series, The Silent Shame, attacks the divorce evil, which now is arousing the interest of ministers, jurists, law-makers and laymen everywhere in the United States. Between South Carolina — where there is no divorce under any conditions — and Nevada — with its complacent Reno — there is a wide gulf. But it is no wider than between the right and the wrong of it as portrayed in this tremendous Who’s Guilty? story.

A too hastily formed judgment of an innocent man’s act — whereby he is forced to take up the life of a haunted and hunted criminal — is the basis of Sowing the Wind. The economic struggle — a wealthy wife and a poor husband — is shown in Sold Out, the sixth of the Who’s Guilty? series. Truth Crushed to Earth concerns itself with the attitude of parents toward their children, of punishment given in moments of passion, of truth and honor crushed when they should be rewarded. The Weaker Strain asks the question, Should a wife be dependent on her husband or has she a right to a career of her own, gained solely by her own efforts?

It is on big but homely themes like these that the Who’s Guilty? pictures have been built. It is believed that a new dramatic note has been reached in this Arrow-made series released by Pathé.

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Anna Nilsson and Tom Moore.

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Rebellion Delays Miss Close

English star misses sailing of liner ‘Finland’ when passenger service to Ireland is stopped.

Friends in New York City who expected to welcome Miss Ivy Close on the liner ‘Finland,’ of the American Line, are now feeling a share of anxiety as the result of cabled advices from the player’s London representative. “Miss Close stranded in Ireland by discontinuance of passenger service” were the brief contents of the cable.

Whether Miss Close was in a section of Ireland unaffected by the rebellion and has merely suffered the temporary inconvenience of waiting for the lifting of the British Government embargo on passenger service, or whether she is in more serious danger is not known. It is believed that Miss Close was making a last visit to her estates in Ireland which have been earned by her successes in England, and on the Continent before sailing for what will probably be a long stay in this country.

Collection: Moving Picture World, May 1916