Youngest Portia

By eye, tooth and stoop of shoulder was Actor George Arliss, now 60, foreordained to be a successful Shylock. The bond between William Shakespeare and a host of U. S. schoolteachers was further assurance that Mr. Arliss, after his tours in The Green Goddess and Old English, could take out The Merchant of Venice and get home a happier, wealthier man, which is what he was when he returned to Manhattan last week from a five-month tour that began in Syracuse and ended, via San Francisco, in Newark, N.J.

It is sometimes said that, what with all the beard, gestures, famed lines and ancient prejudices that cluster about Shylock, the part is an iron-clad one; and that. since the play is either tragedy or comedy depending on the audience, it might be done as well by Eddie Cantor as by a Great Actor. However true such flippancies may be about the type-part of Shylock, they are certainly untrue of the play's great character-part, Portia. And the Arliss tour was memorable for its introduction of the youngest Portia, and one of the best, on record.

In his wisdom Producer Winthrop Ames picked Frieda Inescort. a young lady who, though she began her career in The Truth About Blayds (1922), is still well and honestly within her 20's. Discerning spectators along the "road" soon realized how lucky they were to see a Portia who was neither an old stager nor an eager young thing with stiff knees and an Eve's apple. Thoroughly feminine in the love scenes, persuasively austere in the court room, highly decorative at all times, the Inescort Portia was a characterization high of spirit, finely and clearly enunciated. After seeing her in Chicago, an astute Jewish criminal lawyer offered Miss Inescort a job on his staff. Another episode of the tour: at Detroit, though he did not appear at a performance. Henry Ford mended the Inescort watch.