From School to Screen

Worlds of

the Cinema

What is a person to answer if, one day, a strange man knocks at his door and asks him with perfect politeness: “Would you like your daughter to try her luck in the cinema?”

This, approximately, is what happened last summer to Mrs. Archer of the village of Islington in England. While the younger of her two little girls, Helen, was playing in the street, her lightness and grace caught the eyes of the film director Hugh Stewart and the director Philip Leacock, who were in earnest search of a little girl of about her age to play an important part in the film “Innocent Sinners.” The two film men simply approached her and spoke to her, asking her name and her address, and whether she would like to work in the cinema.

The child went home and told her mother the details of the incident, but the mother paid her daughter no attention, for she knew well her runaway imagination, which seldom rested upon fact. But how great was her astonishment when, the next morning, she received an official telephone call from the film company asking the mother's permission for Helen to visit the studio for a test, which would serve as an examination to judge her cinematic gifts.

Did the mother accept? Of course! After she had talked the matter over with her husband, and the two hastened to comply with the request. But Helen did not go alone; her elder sister June, aged 14, went with her. In the evening the two sisters came back recounting the details of their exciting tests in the “city of the cinema” — and with them glad tidings and a surprise... Success in the examination had fallen to June, not to Helen! It was she who was chosen as the heroine of the film “Innocent Sinners,” for the part demands of its heroine not so much physical beauty as skill in expressing the pent-up feelings of childhood, with which June's own feelings abounded... And so the budding child began wiping the blue ink from her fingertips in preparation for setting to rehearsal

and study... Perhaps she will meet with success and become, between one night and its morning, a glittering star!
It is a great change that has come over the modest Archer family: the father deals in secondhand household furniture, and the mother is a housewife of the first order, and neither of them ever dreamed that fortune's arrow, with its feather, would strike them...
June spends these days persevering at learning her part... her mother helps her, teaching her the words and hearing her recite them before she goes to her bed; and when she accompanies her to the studio for the daily rehearsal, and leaves her in the charge of the management and returns, she peers from the tram window at her daughter's colored picture hung at the entrance of the cinema, and addresses the strangers around her with great pride, pointing to the picture: “Look... that is my daughter!”
And this is something quite natural, for June has proven so far that she is equal to this broad glory that awaits her; and yet the loveliest thing that adorns this girl is that she is natural... utterly natural; her conduct and her behavior have never been touched by the poisons of fame and pride... Perhaps the first credit for this goes back to her parents, and the sound upbringing they secured for her, and the serene family atmosphere in which she grew up.
There remains a fear that flutters at the parents' hearts. What if June should fail in the end, and not reach, in her climb, the top of the ladder?? Even for this possible outcome they are preparing themselves, though its chances are slight, and all the signs indicate that the film “Innocent Sinners,” which will appear soon on the screen, will plant June's foot firmly in the world of the cinema and guarantee her a great name and standing.
June's mother lives in watchfulness and prayer, and she has begun to save and economize so as to provide in advance money enough for June to study the art of the cinema and acting. She lives on a sweet hope — that her little one may soon become the darling of thousands! What great joy awaits the happy family?
This story, which seems as if woven of imagination, is true in every part, and it may happen to any family and to any boy or girl — for fortune advances or turns away, and when it advances the opportunity must be seized — not for our own sakes alone, but for our children and their future...