THE CINEMA.
ROBIN HOOD AND SHACKLETON.
MR. DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS has many of the qualities of an ideal cinema actor. He is dynamic, unpsychological, and sure of all his movements. With the minimum of facial expressiveness and a positive paucity of gesture, he neverthe- less succeeds in differentiating the main stages of a plot and merging his r6le in its development. The kind of emotion he conveys and arouses may be exclusively broad and racy, but it is forceful in its simplicity and directness. Modern athletes, d'Artagnan, Robin Hood—he interprets them all with the same utter joyousness and lack of subtlety. Give him a lasso or a rapier, jumping space and an inaccessible rampart, and he will work wonders—the same set of wonders each time, perhaps, but he seems none the less daring, nor are you even cheated of your thrill by the repetition. His imperturbable vitality, the divine spring in his muscles, are enough to comfort a Freud for any lack of psychological impressiveness ; indeed, they would discover a man of action complex in the most static and sedentary of motive-analysts. So much for Mr. Fairbanks, but Robin Hood, which is now showing at the London Pavilion, calls for a more critical examination of the cinema conventions. In the first place, Robin Hood is no mere stucco figure of hilarious heroism like d'Artagnan ; he is a legendary character whose roots are in our own characters, and we are probably more sensitive to an interpretation of his life, less inclined to typify him bluffly and casually, than we imagine. The reason is plain : we all know ourselves for deep fellows, impossible of definition, and in this gentleman outlaw we recognize some of our own ideals, and even possibilities.
" The merry pranks he play'd, would ask an age to tell, And the adventures strange that Robin Hood befell " ;
and so a selection is all we can expect from Mr. Fairbanks. But how different, in tone and substance, are the scenario and the ballads 1 Here is a heightened but very fair example of the way in which the cinema generally shies from " reality " for the sake of scenic and sensational effects : Richard Cceur- de-Lion is made the pivot of the story, and his castle the centre of action, not for any dramatic advantage, but because such situations lend themselves to easy scenic opportunities in the films. If this were a mere puristic matter Mr. Charles B. Cochran, the producer, would be justified in asserting, as he does, that " no fetters of history need distress . . . a maker of pictures who addresses himself to the fascinating story of Robin Hood." There is little enough history about Robin Hood, but the mass of ballads are all the more sacred in that they are an amalgam made by the popular imagination
around one of the most significant of folk-heroes. The film suffers from this artifice, and so does Mr. Fairbanks, but the scope allowed him is sufficient for a very exciting display of sheer energy and muscular kindliness. If his tricks and gestures are rather too modern to support the illusion, Miss Enid Bennett as Maid Marian is bewitchingly medieval in appearance, and Mr. Wallace Berry as Richard, and Mr. Sam de Grasse as Prince John are very convincing as the two contrasted types of the Crusading period. And there can be no doubt of the technical brilliance of the film, nor of the pleasure it gives by the unwavering clearness of ite, photography.
The performance at the New Scala, where the story of Shackleton's last expedition, Southward in the Quest,' is being shown, is a slight disappointment after the recent excellence of Pole Negri in Passion. The prologue-play is too melodramatic an introduction to the film, which is unpretentious and, on the whole, interesting. Commander Wild lectures with restraint and good humour, a tone which suits that of the fresh and witty sub-titles. Whatever its faults and inadequacies, this film is certainly worth seeing. The New Scala, moreover, is by now one of those few West-End cinema theatres which can always be relied on for a good
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