CLEVER MUTE

Charlie Chaplin does not choose to speak. A conservative at heart, despite his caperings, the first comedian of the screen has made his latest picture after the mute manner. One by one the advocates of silent acting have been coaxed by producers or brow-beaten by public taste into becoming articulate. The result has been trying. No longer need a person who lisps or has a major impediment in their speech worry about a vocation. They can now go into pictures. And if the infirmament is noticeable enough they are often whisked to stardom.

But Mr. Chaplin is the last of the old guard to rely on native dramatic ability to gain his effects. Acting, is his art, the art of pantomime, and he does not want applause that is bought by gazing at a cardboard balcony and exercising a wheezy tenor, or archly boop-boop-a-doopering. The master comedian is clearly of the opinion that motion pictures, like peacocks, are fine when they silently unfold their tails, but when they attempt to speak it's a very different matter.