THE CINEMA
PROGRESS IS BEING MADE
AT its very lowest, the moving picture brings every week both happiness and a definite nervous and mental relaxation to many millions of jaded human units in our less than ideal industrial civilizations. Its social value is great : the cinema plays no small part in broadening the common horizon ; its ubiquitous Path e Gazette and travel films alone deserve credit for supplying a vicarious experience of contemporary events and foreign places which quite certainly is evolving, gradually, countless men and women who are "citizens of the world." But, beyond all this, though the moving picture has affinities with the respectable muses, it is a substitute for none of them, but one of the phenomena for which our age will be remem, bered a new art born painfully and ingloriously, as no doubt the other arts too were born in unremembered days—a new art more than we realize, for though it tells a story it is not a literary form ; though it is a pictorial medium it is also a dramatic one ; yet its concerns are not those of the theatre and its problems the very opposite of those that confront painters.
Happily for its progress two excellent things have lately happened. The public—and I must insist that the cinema to-day is frequented by men and women in every rank of society and of every degree of culture—has ceased to regard the " pictures " solely as a momentary distraction, and recognizes in them a possible vehicle of unique emotional and visual beauty. It is true that the seriousness and good taste of tardy German films, such as Passion and Destiny, did much towards making the public begin to discritninate. But at the same time producers of films in every country are trying with gradual success to do better. The valiant Charlie Chaplin ren- dered the cinema a great service—the great comic actor had rendered it many others—when he very nearly made a superb film of The Woman of Paris, and showed his confreres not only that film-acting could be made highly significant but that a melodrama, in pictures, might be a rich and dignified thing. It is to him and to Ernst Lubitsch that we owe the growing realization that if a film, of no matter what type, is to be worth while, it must be entirely dominated by the will of one man and one man only—the director. A film is made up of so many ingredients, prepared over so large an area and so long a space of time that it must be controlled by that one man as abso- lutely as an orchestra is by the man with the baton. And film- stars, instead of attempting to allure the public, must subor- dinate their own personalities to the parts they play. Indeed, it would be ideal if they could remain as anonymous as are the violins and 'cellos, the drums and horns in even the best orchestras. Failing that, we certainly expect them to give us more than chocolate-box beauty and manly strength.
One of the best tendencies at the moment is a noticeable simplification of plot and a greater insistence on expressive acting and convincing psychology. Nothing could have been simpler than the dignified biography of Abraham Lincoln, in my opinion the best American film of last year though not the most important or useful one. Two other melodramas in the same manner as The Woman of Paris were equally simple and well acted—The Red Lily and Three Women—while The Marriage Circle, for all the smooth efficiency and delicate satire of that excellent comedy, was totally unpretentious. It has at last been established that impossibly sudden conversions, forite. happy endings, plots that shock common sense, and behaviour bordering on insanity are not, as we once feared, an integral part of every film. Intoxicated with its own technical resources, the cinema some while back threw "the infinite capacity for taking pains" overboard and tried to mesmerize us into empty astonishment at its capacity to juggle with time and space. Now it is going soberly back to the business of learning to walk before it can fly to supreme distinction. There are half-a-dozen quiet and good American films in store for this year already, marred it is true by senti- mentalities, errors of judgment, false psychology here and there, but far less than we have learnt to expect, and all imbued with a sincerity, an ordered decency agreeable to persons of discrimination. D. W. Griffith's Isn't Life Won- derful, an intimate and sensitive study of Polish refugees in a
itarving„ post-War Germany, is one of these, The Salvation un tees another, also in a minor key. Not least, a new Jannings film, The Last Man, will most encouragingly demon- strate that the Germans, even when they abandon morbid subjects, can after all tell a simple and very human picture- story with a satisfying happy ending.
It may well be that other ambitious horrors like the absurd Ten Commandments, Dante's Inferno, and Hunchback of Notre Dante will follow : not all new films will feel the new influences. But even in the spectacular, for which the cinema in capable hands is so magically designed, there is improvement. Vast ;inns were spent in making The Thief of Baghdad and Monsieur Beaucaire gorgeous, but occasionally they purchased pictorial beauty : the latter was nOw and then a pageant of gallant and turbulent satins, while in the former a desire to rival the visual loveliness of the rather unexciting Niebeiiings was obvious. In The Sea Hawk, soon to be released, there are fewer good things and the actors look little enough like Elizabethans : even so, there are finely composed scenes of slave-galleys crawling past the Mediterranean foreshore which repay one for the rest of the costly failure. And for once, France rivals the best of German and American pageantry with her Miracle of the Wolves, an exciting, historically accurate and commendable picture with which the new London theatre, The Capitol, in the Haymarket, has just opened. There was once a time when any animated photography satisfied those who went to the pictures, and any shabby hall was good enough to house them. To-day, we have both excellent historical spectacles like The Miracle of the Wolves, and the more intimate dramas which, if they are not the best that we can expect from the cinema, are at least as worthy as the majority of plays filling our theatres ; while this magnificent new picture-palace, like the older Tivoli in the Strand, with its dignified violet and silver colour-scheme, roomy and well-placed seats, and perfect ven- tilation indicates not only the new type of patron that -exists but also the dignity and powers to which this novel but no longer despised art of the cinema is rising.
IRIS BARRY.
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