Judge — January 14, 1922 — page 12: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

y i All’s Swell That Ends Swell “< ET-RICH QUICK WALLING- FORD?” is one of the films built around the notion that a happy ending is a final scene in which all the characters appear in evening clothes. ‘The idea seems to be “All’s Swell that Ends Swell.” We are under the impression that George M. Cohan was the first to de- vise the formula and to employ it in his dramatic version of Wallingford. Since then it has become a commonplace in every play about small-town life. We have in the first act the lobby of the Grand Hotel, rambling and ram- shackle, with the chief citizens of the community sitting about the stove smoking their pipes. In act four everything has been trans- formed. Through the ingenuity and energy of the crooks or confidence men who act as heroes of our little play, prosperity has come to Hicksville. The Grand Hotel has been entirely rebuilt. Instead of honest pine we have imita- tion marble. Pipes have been banished. There is a thick rug on the floor to catch the dust and inconvenient recep- tacles for cigarette ashes. Dinner is now a /a carte, and costs four times as much as it used to. Somebody in the play is ambushed in the centre of the lobby, and has a silver loving-cup thrust into his hands. Then he makes a speech, and the cur- tain comes down to indicate that the play has ended. If this is the popular playwright’s idea of a happy ending we would not dare to undergo the fearful devastation which must be wrought by one of his tragedies. IT" SEEMS to us deplorable, although understandable, that the successful dramatic trick of the season before last should be continued into the present season by cautious and imitative play- wrights. It seems to us equally de- plorable and a little mysterious that scenario writers should feel impelled to copy closely the manners of the men who write for the spoken drama. The films ought to stay in their own back- yard. They ought to be glad, too, for theirs is a yard as limitless as the world. They can send their story chas- ing up to the tops of mountains and By Heywoop Broun down into jungles. Deserts, glaciers, geysers, and some of the smaller oceans, can fit into their scheme of things, and why on earth motion-picture plots should be allowed to poke their heads into the tiny cubicles of the drama and shut the door behind them passes our comprehension. “Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford,” for instance, is almost slavish in the man- ner in which it copies the methods used by Cohan in dramatizing the story of George Randolph Chester. In the final act of the piece, as played upon the stage, there was a backdrop showing the new houses of the nascently prosperous characters in the play and, in front of these, small models of trolley cars moved carrying tiny electric lights. It was amusing. The models did not look like trolley cars, but that was not the idea. “Doesn’t that sound like an ap- proaching horseman?” asked one of the characters in still another Cohan play, as two off-stage cocoanut shells were slapped together rhythmically. “No, not exactly,” answered the comedian, “but it’s surely a darn good effect.” That, we take it, was the scheme of the backdrop in the play of Walling- ford, but a motion-picture director should not have been under any great necessity of following in Cohan’s foot- steps. Requiring trolley cars, he could have gone out and brought in trolley cars, Sometimes they make an excel- lent illusion of being trolley cars. As a matter of fact, we are prejudiced against most indoor motion pic- tures. We do not mean that no char- acter in a film shall ever be allowed to come in out of the rain, nor do we contend that every emotional conflict ought to take place on top of Mount Blanc or just below the Horseshoe Falls. We are simply suggesting that when feasible and suitable the scenario writer ought to be glad to let his char- acters out for an airing. When we see a well-photographed film, in which there is some snatch of ocean or a wooded field with wind stirring, we are moved to doubt greatly the fundamen- tal and everlasting superiority of the spoken drama so often asserted by more or less critical persons. No matter how great the eloquence of the spoken word, there are physical handicaps which can rob it of its savor. Vaughn Moody’s fine play, “The Great Divide,” never moved us much because we always remembered a certain scene in which the heroine led another char- acter to the edge of a precipice and loudly called upon him to look at the view and fall under the spell of the great and untamed West. On the particular afternoon in which we saw the play, the view consisted of a blue cyclorama, all too evidently made of canvas and even more palpably wrink- led. It was a sky marred in the mak- ing, and it hung limply exactly six inches in front of the noses of the two persons in the play who were talking about God’s great outdoors. Mr. Moody’s English was not eloquent enough to create an illusion for us in the face of these circumstances, ‘THE problem of the scenario writer differs fundamentally from that of the playwright. He cannot do much with words which come out in captions rather coldly and formally. Instead, he must say it with trees, and clouds and mountains, and these are not with- out eloquence. “Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them,” said Chorus apolo- getically in Shakespeare’s “Henry V.” It was a good dramatic device, but it would have been a poor one for the motion-pictures. The director’s busi- ness would be not to talk about horses, but to show them swarming across the plains of Flanders. Shakespeare, we think, would have done the same if he could, for we believe the discovery has already been made in Hollywood that Shakespeare might have done ex- tremely well with a Griffith or a De- Mille to guide him. Of course, it would have been necessary for him to learn some things first, and the motion- picture producers could well afford to learn with him. The chief lesson, we think, would be that the screen is not a substitute for the stage, and not even a poor relation—but, for better or worse, a separate and distinct art form. comicbooks.com :