Monday, Mar. 23, 1925

Sally. Florenz Ziegfeld's roseate musical comedy is almost literally dished up on the screen. The progress of the foundling waif who graduates from dish-washing in a cabaret to dancing and ultimately wins her Prince Charming with her tripping feet is punctuated by smashes of tableware. Leon Errol, staggering through his original role of the duke turned waiter, makes much of this china cataract undeniably funny. Colleen Moore by her sympathy and intelligence deflates much of the hokum from the title role. She dances with genuine talent and abandon-- it is said she threw herself so completely into the part as to sprain her back.

Seven Chances. Buster Keaton has taken this Belasco stage success; shuffled quickly through the seven proposals required for him to win a bride who will save his typically farcical inheritance by marrying him and devoted most of his impulsive gestures to a frantic cross-country chase. He is pursued by the feminine furies who answer his advertisement for a wife. A vast deal of cachinnation ensues at his various predicaments in escaping these women, Hell-bent for matrimony.

The Air Mail. This might be called a mechanically perfect story. Incidents are poured into the hopper to grind out exciting sequences. Still, the tale of an air mail pilot, beset by airplane bandits for his registered mail, has the genuine thrill of aerial explorations into pastures new. The scenes of parachute jumping and of one airplane deliberately crashing against another in sky-high warfare are consummately contrived and there is a picturesque battle between opposing bands of robbers in a deserted town. Warner Baxter, the postal Daedalus, has little to do but submit gracefully to being hit on the head. Billie Dove supplies the large-eyed element of romance, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., refined parachute jumper, wears long hair like his father in The Thief of Bagdad.

Bad Company is more proof that all musical comedy actresses are good little devils at heart. The one depicted by the pallid but ingratiating Madge Kennedy even turns gun-woman and steals a will in order to save her sappy brother from a golddigger, and the early part of the story is worked out with smart trickery. The rest is melodrama.