The Play and the Screen
Skinner, R. Dana
The Pulitzer Prize Play SEVERAL months ago, it was my good fortune to read a small volume of one-act plays, gathered together imder the title of Lonesome Road. As theatrical openings were...
...White and black make bad mixtry," answers another...
...Abe is bad mixed up all down inside," says one Negro...
...All of folklore and legend is awaiting the magic which the screen can impart...
...The producers have requested audiences not to reveal the derivation of the title, Chang...
...They were by Paul Green, an instructor in philosophy at one of our southern universities...
...Julie^ HERE is a case where, most humbly, I must act as collaborator with the author of the play...
...They planned, let us say, to take the story of the daily life of a native family, a little more hardy than the rest, which had ventured farther than the tribe into the jungle in order to establish a home...
...Of course, the traditional story in motion-picture form has its definite utility for the vast number of towns possessing no legitimate theatre, and for the still larger number of people who cannot afford adnaissiori to the modern high-priced theatre...
...Illusion is there in the magical effect wrought by expert photography, but towering above illusion is irresistible reality...
...But in Chang, by going to reality itself for drama, the producers have definitely accomplished with the motion picture what no other medium could possibly achieve...
...But in this case, my services being unsolicited, I neither seek nor expect riches...
...was only pretending to be thej mother to shield a hypocritical young New Hampshire girl and, incidentally, to help mamma's revenue...
...In these few words you have the exposition of the whole tragedy, of a story that sweeps through years of struggle, of hope, of defeat, until, driven almost insane by a beating of masked white men, Abraham meets his white half-brother on a lonely road, quivers under his insults and blows, and at last strikes out blindly with murder in his heart...
...Give me peace, rest— rest if it is thy will...
...And precisely here do we find that amazing authenticity which gives the film its power...
...Chang SOMETIMES the screen justifies itself so startlingly as to wipe out all memory of Hollywood) atrocities...
...His own race despises him for his love of learning, for all his efforts to raise them above ignorance and superstition...
...Blast me, Lawd, in yo' thunder and lightning," he cries out, "bum me in yo' fiery furnace if it is yo' will...
...Green himself never minces words, but if the brutal frankness of some passages gives undue offense to anyone, this much may be said, that realism of speech has never been used with less theatrical intention nor with greater sincerity of purpose...
...If it is the same girl, she must be heartily tired of dialect by this time...
...Yo' will, yo' will, not mine...
...But the large-scale productions have been all too few in which the central thought was to find the greatest use for an extremely flexible medium by bringing to all classes of people scenes, spectacles, emotions and illusions of which the stage is incapable...
...The real mystery is how it got there in the first place...
...Few plays of recent times have stripped the tortured soul of a man so bare, few have shown the same exaltation of humble heroism...
...Ketch me away in de whirlwind, fob I'm a sinner...
...At all events, her present performance matches that of Wilson—simple, commanding and full of a fine integrity...
...His performance is marked by an utter simplicity amounting to consummate artistry...
...This same Paul Green has just won this year's Pulitzer Prize for a full-length version of In Abraham's Bosom, a play which actually comprises two of the one-act plays in Lonesome Road with some additional scenes, giving it in its lengthened form the character of a dramatic biography...
...Green's writing its amazing integrity and power...
...The mystery which must envelop the third act may do some injustice to the actors who stmggled bravely, among them Alison Skipworth as the mamma, and Betty Pierce, whose face and voice seem to recall the "me, Tondelaya" scenes of White Cargo...
...Chang is a picture to be seen, and once seen never to be forgotten...
...They planned, also, to illustrate day by day the dangers and hardships such a family would encounter, the attacks of tigers and leopards, the wrecking of precious crops, the massive resistance of the strong jungle, ever jealous of man...
...He knows his Negro too well to sentimentalize him...
...The special field of his observation has been that "vast and fertile coastal plain" of North Carolina, "which stretches inland from the sea to a maximum distance of 125 miles...
...He is describing, not pleading...
...This is a hard limitation, because the sequence of the film leads up with strong and measured tread to the climax when Chang appears and wreaks untold destruction...
...One always feels sorry for good actors in a poor play...
...Again, in the field of fancy, the screen can create illimitable illusions, as witness The Thief of Bagdad with its flying carpet...
...Bad, bad...
...Yet even here the majesty of him shines forth...
...I've tried, I've tried to walk de path, but I'm po' and sinful...
...They have, of course, started off with a scenario...
...In this case the play was probably not so bad as its painfully slow direction...
...the same uncomfortable little theatre which brought Eugene O'Neill to eminence and has, countless times, shown a courage and perception far surpassing the commercial hierarchs of Broadway...
...Collaborators are said to receive huge sums...
...It is not the white man who defeats Abraham McCranie, but the children of his own race...
...The result is a contribution of immense importance to motion-picture history, and a demonstration that the worst damage to the screen has been done by attempting to limit it to the confines of legitimate drama, instead of using it primarily to do what the stage cannot possibly do...
...Heart say do one thing, head say 'nudder...
...With his brother's blood on his hands, he comes to his hovel to urge his wife to flee, for he knows his own doom is sealed...
...Dat make him wanta climb up and be sump'n...
...For actors, they have taken untrained natives and the beasts of the jungle...
...Nigger down heah," says the first, thumping on his chest, and then, thumping his head, "white mens up heah...
...Save me, Jesus, save mel" It is after this prayer that he goes to his cabin door, tlo be met by the rattle of rifles that carries him to the bosom of eternal mercy...
...In the case of Chang, those motion-picture pioneers, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, have built what they call a natural melodrama by going to the" jungles of Siam and centering a drama of intense power around the struggle of man against nature...
...But this much one can say, that there are a few moments toward the latter half of the picture when all the bolts of nature are let loose and when, in the immensity of power that sweeps across a suddenly enlarged screen, all the concocted devices of Hollywood thrillers pale into a thin shadow of the unchained thunders of the jungle...
...All I know is that a certain little French girl had a wicked hard-drinking mamma, who tried to sell her to a bootlegging Canadian named Pierre at the very moment she was being sought in honorable marriage by Lee Stone...
...The other parts are more than competently taken, and the direction of Jasper Deeter has given to the entire drama a throbbing ascension of power...
...There seems little doubt that Paul Green is destined to become one of our most important playwrights—not because of any amazing technical skill, but because of his sensitive power of observation and a depth of intense feeling which he is able to translate into the limited terms of the theatre...
...Where the ultimate blame lies, that blame which accumxilates through centuries, Paul Green does not attempt to say...
...If you really want to know what happened to Julie, you must hurry to the theatre, because I don't imagine it will be there many days more...
...And then a third Negro adds, "De white blood in him coming to de top...
...The price wavered between twenty and twenty-four bottles of "good stuff," and remained at twenty-four when last heard from...
...But by the end of the second act, I had an insatiable desire to turn it into a, mystery play—at least for the readers of this paper...
...The part of Abraham's wife, Goldie, is taken by Rose McClendon, who, if I am' not mistaken, is the same Negro actress who brought distinction suddenly to life in the last act of Deep River as the matron of the octoroons...
...Once more, it is to the historic little Provincetown Playhouse that we owe the New York production of this play...
...The particular core of tragedy in the prize play is the struggle of a Negro with a white father—a Negro whose mind soars like a prophet, with all the intellectual ambition of the white, but whose emotional life is that of his race, a desperate inner conflict which sooner or later must find its counterpart in his outer life...
...But a lot had to be left to chance...
...Nigger gwine hoi' him down, dough...
...In brief, and for the first time in my recollection, I picked up my hat and coat and left the theatre without waiting for the third-act solution...
...The said author, Professor Coming White, intended Julie to be a comedy or tragedy or drama of some French Canadians somewhere in northern New Hampshire...
...The reconstruction of historyf is| one special field for the screen, and such films as Ben Hur or The Big Parade show eloquently what can be done when producers set their minds to it...
...It is the total lack of partisan thesis that gives Mr...
...And among the whites, he is equally an exile, suspected, mistrusted and secretly feared...
...Frank Wilson is the Negro actor who makes Abraham McCranie one of the outstanding and unforgettable figures of American drama...
...He is still more concerned with the intimate facts that have to do with a particular Abraham McCranie...
...I do not mean in any way to belittle this service of the screen...
...It has been given to Paul Green to show how the highest and the lowest can be implanted in a single human heart and from this tragic inner misery how the last drops of pitiful anguish can be wrung...
...Part of him lak de Colonel, part lak his muh, 'vision and misery inside...
...He is more concerned with the tragedy of present facts than with the abstractions of history...
...As theatrical openings were infrequent at the moment, I included a review of the plays in these columns...
...One also discovered that Julie was supposed to( have had a baby, but that in reality the heroic little thing (the "me, Julie, good girl" type...
Vol. 6 • May 1927 • No. 3
