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CRIMSON PLAYGOER

Muddied Murder Mystery Has Few Merits and Another Silly Film Called "Shop Angel" Has Less

The opportunities for entertainment in Boston this week are distressingly curtailed, what with the theatres dark and "The Woman in Room 13" distributed about the town at the Fenway, Modern, and Beacon. It is a weird "plot pourri" of all the tales handed in at the Fox office this last twelvemonth. Miss Landi tramps along through a divorce court, a murder court, and out to the glaring sunlight of a tennis court where she serves very badly, and back again into prison to see her husband serve for his double fault. It is a grotesque slow-moving business made possible by the wrinkling nose of Miss Landi and the early murder of Mr. Gilbert Roland. It all comes out for the best in the end when Neil Hamilton as the husband gives up his ways as a high flyer and makes a happy Landi.

The other movie must be considered at great length for it is immeasurably worse. "Shop Angel" is the name that appears on the screen but one is forced, upon a close examination of the heroine, to feel that the unpleasant word "worn" was deleted from the title by the careful producers. A very dull work it is, that seems to go on merely because the company had about five thousand feet of film to use up before declaring bankruptcy. It is all about a good girl who works in a company and who, despite the warnings of her friends, goes to visit her employer, on business of course, in his pent house. It is not a usual pent house at all, for it opens out on an African Zoo which the employer explains away by his passion for the Orient, an explanation which did not allay the suspicion that the set was a jungle scene that was shipped by mistake to the wrong lot. The employer proves to be a lecherous old party and real damage is only prevented by the arrival of a very righteous and breathless hero.

The acting on the whole is so bad as to defy description. An obscure man whose name, if it is remembered correctly, is Anthony something or other steals whatever there is of the show. It is a pity he couldn't have kept it better hidden.

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