The Cinema
"Boy Meets Girl, 1436 "—so the programme heads the story of Romeo mid Juliet, which it tells with some inaccuracy ; but this fourth attempt to screen Shakespeare is not as bad as that. Unimaginative, certainly, coarse-grained, a little banal, it is frequently saved—by Shakespeare—from being a bad lilm. The late Irving Thalberg, the producer, has had a funeral success second only to Rudolph Valentino's, but there is nothing in this film to show that he was a producer of uncommon talent. He has made a big film, as Hollywood recognises that adjective : all is on the characteristic Metro- Goldwyn scale : a Friar Laurence's cell with the appearance, as another critic has put it, of a modern luxury flat, with ii laboratory of retorts and test-tubes worthy of a AVelLs super- man (no " osier cage" of a few flowers and weeds) ; a balcony so high that Juliet should really have conversed with Romeo in shouts like a sailor from the crow's nest sighting land ; spectacular beginning with the Montagues and Capulets parading through pasteboard streets to the same church, rather late, it appears from the vague popish singing off, for Benediction ; Verona seen from the air, too palpably a childish model ; an audible lark proclaiming in sparrow accents that it is not the nightingale ; night skies sparkling with improbable tinsel stars; and lighting so oddly timed that when Juliet remarks that the mask of night is on her face, "else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek," not Verona's high moon could have lit her more plainly.
But on the credit side are more of Shakespeare's words than we have grown to expect, a few more indeed than he ever wrote, if little of the subtlety of his dramatic sense which let the storm begin slowly with the muttering of a few servants, rather titan with this full-dress riot. The picture has been given a Universal Certificate, and one was pleasantly surprised to find how safely our film censors had slumbered through many a doubtful passage : even "the bawdy hand of the dial" had not disturbed the merry gentlemen's rest. The nurse's part has suffered, but more from Miss Edna May Oliver's clowning than from a censor. This part and Mercutio's suffer most from overacting. Mr. John Barrymorc's
middle- aged Mercutio is haggard with the grease-paint of a thousand Broadway nights. Mr. Basil Ilathbone is a fine vicious Tybalt, and Mr. Leslie' Howard and Miss Norma Shearer spoke verse as verse should be spoken and were very satisfying ill the conventional and romantic and dreamy mode (one still Waits to see lovers hot with lust and youth and Verona fevers, as reckless as their duelling families, "like fire and powder which as they kiss consume ").
It is the duels and violence which come off well, Mercutio's death and Tybalt's, and, more convincing than on the stage, the final fight with Paris in the tomb, but I am less than ever Convinced that there is an aesthetic justification for filming Shakespeare at all. The effect of even the best scenes is to distract, much in the same way as the old Tree productions distracted : we cannot look and listen simultaneously with equal vigilance. But that there may be a social justification I do not dispute : by all means let Shakespeare, even robbed Of half his drama and three-quarters of his poetry, be mass- Produced. One found oneself surrounded in the theatre by Proiperous middle-aged ladies anxiously learning the story in the programme for the first time ; urgent whispers came from the knowing ones, as Romeo went down into the Capulet tomb, preparing their timorous companions for an unexpected and unhappy ending. It may very well be a social duty to teach the great middle-class a little about Shakespeare's plays. But the poetry—shall we ever get the poetry upon the screen except in fits and starts (the small scene between Romeo and the ruined apothecary he bribes to sell him poison was exquisitely played and finely directed), unless we abjure all the liberties the huge sets and the extras condemn us to ? Something like Dreyer's Passion of Jeanne d'Arc, the whitewashed wall and the slow stream of faces, might preserve a little more of the Poetry than this commercial splendour.
GRAHAM GREEN-E.
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