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4. THE HEEBIE JEEBIES January 31, 1925.

THE HEEBIE JEEBIES
"A Sign of Intelligence"
Published Weekly by the Famous Writer's Guild
3423 Indiana Ave.   Doug. 1741   Chicago, Illinois
The Editor: Percival L. Prattos
The Artist: Charles C. Dawson
VOLUME 1 JANUARY 31, 1925 NUMBER 10.
$ 2.00 Yearly. The Copy: 5 Cents

"EAST OF SUEZ"
ONE of the most useful tools of the movie magnates is a young lady from Poland.  Her name is Pola Negri.  She is, in many instances, the raison d'ĂȘtre of the films that make her salary.  We do not know motion picture.  We have never seen Charlie Chaplin, in or out of the pictures.  But in our limited experience Miss Negri has been as the only biscuit on a tiny plate.  We believe she succeeded Theda Bara as a vamp and, although she claims Polish descent, we'd quibble over a name and declare that both Cleopatra and Nerfertiti, old Tut's queen, were Negris of long ago.

We refer to her as a tool because, in most stories in which we have seen her, she has been picked to do work that few, if any, other white women would do.  She performs a bold mission.  If our memory serves us correctly, we see her in The Passion Flower, Bella Donna, East of Suez and other picture plays of a similar character.  One of the principal qualities in all three is that of the hare-brained, love-struck woman and the motif of two is the probable relation of races, the white race as against some other darker group.  Sometimes she loses in her game of love, but most often she drags the flag of white superiority in the mud only to hoist it in greater triumph when the dark man may be thoroughly humiliated.

THAT was the burden of Bella Donna.  That is the theme of East of Suez.  China is east of Suez.  Pola is the illegitimate result of clandestine relation between her father, a well-to-to Englishman doing business in the Chinese empire, and her mother, her father's Chinese maid.  It is said that there was a marriage.  The report of it puts the English father out of caste with other Englishmen.

He sends his Eurasion daughter to England to be educated, where she stays until she is grown and the decides to return.  He dies shortly after receiving the new that she has set sail.  The daughter arrives in China thinking that she is a sure-enough white woman.  She is shunned.  White men love her.  Chinese men love her.  Ultimately, she learns that her maid is her mother, that instead of being white she is Chinese.  She stands before her mirror, rubs her skin and looks at her eyes, looking for the oriental slant.  She does not want to be Chinese.  She wants to be what she has thought she was, white.  After much travail, circumstances are worked around where she can be white.  She is beautiful and the white race wins her, one of those handsome English attaches.  The conniving Chinese mandarin loses her and with him down goes the yellow race.

THAT is the white man's business: to prove that he is always right, never wrong; to always win, never lose; to have all of beauty, even with a touch of Chinese of Negro; to be ever strong, never weak; to be the force that moves and decides.

Miss Negri is helping to prove it.  In her vampish way, she lets the races of men fight for her.  She is a glutton for love, but likes the color of gin although Bourbon is never far behind.  The relations of men are a bit of Chantilly lace and Pola is a flaw.  Little round-headed, blond-haired white boys look at her in pictures and see dark lovers, servants and losers, and grow up to be disillusioned.  If Miss negri were an American she could join the Ku Klux Klan.  Now she can only entertain it and makie it believe it is right.  East of Suez, here, there, everywhere, be it ever remembered, the white man is triumphant.