In writing "Bitter Truth," a five-reel photo-melodrama produced by the Fox Film Corporation, the author has followed the rules laid down by the Davis-Kramer-Blaney school of dramatists at the time they gave out the dramatic law and took in the author's profits of the Popular Price Circuit of ten years ago. It will be recalled that the master playwrights of that branch of the spoken drama wrote tor a distinct grade of patrons, rather simple-minded folk that preferred brawn to brain, physical action to psychology, and went in strong for comic relief, and plenty of it. And it is quite within reason to suppose that the same class of honest citizens would be enjoying a like made of dramas to-day, but for the advent of the moving picture play. At any rate, "Bitter Truth" is cunningly calculated to appeal to a similar element .among amusement seekers. Mary Murillo, the writer of the scenario, has made a careful study of the old models, and her work is equal to the best thriller ever produced by Al Wood when "Chinatown Charlie" was among his best money-getters. The heroine of "Bitter Truth" is a girl of the slums, the daughter of a thief. She is unjustly sent to prison, and, on her release, devotes herself to becoming revenged on the judge that gave her her sentence. She becomes an inmate of the judge's house and is just about to assist his political enemies in making him the victim of a scandal when the man who has always loved her succeeds in arousing her better nature. The most sensational scene takes place on a Hudson River steamboat, but there are other thrilling situations, and the comic relief is supplied by a fat Irish cook and equally weighty colored maid and an elongated iceman. The humor is primitive but unmistakable. Virginia Pearson acts Anne, the girl who never had a chance to go straight, with the amount of fervid theatricalism demanded in plays of this nature. As a vampire she looks fetching and spreads her net for the undoing of the judge in quite the Theda Bara fashion. Jack Hopkins, William H. Tooker, Alice May and Sidney D'Albrook have the other leading characters. Kenean Buel directed the production. – The Moving Picture World, January 27, 1917
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