The Play

...applies to judgments passed not only on detective plays, on nearly every kind of dramatic writing...

...Whatever the outcome, not a few have already replaced religion with an elaborate cult of nationalism...

...Before this inner convic- tion, facts slowly assume new aspects and permit of new inter- pretations...

...It is a girl who actually solves the crime, and...

...The casting of the play is excellent, and has much to do with the general pleasure of the evening...

...The very fact that you see what he does not see creates a state of mind varying from mild concern to positive hysteria...

...Instead, she reverses the usual process and refuses to accept appearance which her feelings will not justify...

...scene in which she arrives step by step at her conclusion delightful (if slightly exaggerated) example of the r61e i tion can play if left to run its course freely before l~ checked by too many facts and too much cold logic...

...LL things flow...

...It is as loud when he is far off in the depths of a room as when he is in the foreground...

...The only mystery is for the characters of the play...

...Of course there is some of this in nearly every ,~ constructed play, but the general trend of play reading producing today ignores its really central value...

...At present a man's voice is as loud when his back is turned as when he is facing us...

...She has no justification except her "feeling" that her uncle was not the kind of man who would kill himself...

...You are offered instead the mental action and suspense of the people in the household, which not only form a satisfactory substitute, but illustrate very aptly a quality of good drama generally forgotten or ignored by managers in search of "action" plays...

...Bad synchroni- zation is merely bad mechanics, whereas the correct focusing of sound demands the invention of some entirely new device...

...But that the complete talkie of today is torture, I think no sensitive person would deny--and for several good reasons which are easily demonstrated...

...Creating this sort of suspense has been a favorite device of dramatists from the days of Greek classicism on down...

...That is reason why The Perfect Alibi has an exemplary import far beyond the value of the little play' itself...

...For Professor Randall the question of today is whether the Christian tradition can again display its old vitality under this latest effort at reconstruction in which the new must be absorbed and fused with the old...

...Art has become divorced from life as a vital and compelling expression of it...

...She wouh try to convince herself against her instincts...

...It seems that we at least are the first generation to realize just how deeply the two great forces of change in the last century, science and its product, the machine, are altering every phase of life, making as they do so many things and ways once thought indispensable now quite irrelevant, and installing new forces in every sphere with a casualness and yet a sureness that is bound to bewilder even the most alert of mind...

...With the help of her fianc6, during a quiet mid- night hour, she reexamines the situation, regroups facts, dis- covers new ones, links up discrepancies in the story, breaks down the "perfect" alibi of the murderers and arrives at a plan of action which, though perilous, will force a confession before a witness...

...A third torture may soon be eliminated--and that is the combined result of mediocre dialogue and actors who are still floundering around in trying to adapt to the new medium...

...With this advance of science has come its product, the machine, the most important event of modern times...

...The old Heraclitean postuIate here , receives at the hands of Professor Randall its newest ;ion and with something of that same unsatisfactory elusive- which is bound to accompany any philosophy of becoming .....ontrast with one of being...

...Scotland Yard detective has arrived at a conclusion of sut The murdered man's niece is simply not satisfied...

...Just now the change is unusually radical even though we make the proper allowance for the distorted perspective which the present naturally places before our minds...

...I am quite aware that certain processes of sound recording are vastly ahead of others in assuring a correct mechanical timing, hut the fact remains that a number of films are being put on the market with such imperfect timing that the effort to follow with both eye and ear is nothing short of a serious mental strain, sufh lent to destroy all illusion and all sense of enter- tainment...

...The talkies are new, distinct, and, unfortunately for the moment, painfully primitive...

...But this was not to be, and in spite of the later interest in the girl's work, I felt a genuine disappointment belonging to the "lost opportunity" order...

...That is the point to remember...

...The scene is cleverly managed--rather too cleverly in fact to be fully credible--and has, in addition to its dramatic interest, the value of justifying a psychological func- tion which too many mystery writers discredit...

...To get to the bottom of the present flux we must go back to the close of the thirteenth century which witnessed the break-up of the most perfect equilibrium which human society has ever achieved, a harmony which is no doubt the cause of our frequent wistful but really useless backward glances at this period...

...A quite genteel murder takes place in the first act, and the audience is admitted to full knowledge of all the facts at once...

...All criticism based on the idea that talkies are a development from the older, silent form gives a false perspec- tive...

...One is because the play is likely to continue indefinitely, so that present comment will not really be belated for many who have had to wait their turn for tickets...

...The most obvious difference between The Perfect Alibi and the general run of mystery plays is that it has no mystery...

...v York: Frederick ,4...

...Ran- dall catches not a few interesting overtones that are too often hard to hear against the enormous din which is modern life...

...In telling the story which he previously narrated at greater length in his Making of the Modern Mind, Dr...

...Vivian Tobin, who is generally too sweet and simpering, brings her reed-plpe voice to an effective pitch and acts with persuasive sincerity...

...The machine has further crowded out even interest in the ways of religion and replaced it with a naturalistic faith in science...

...The most obvious torture (aside from the mechanical sound of the reproducer) comes from the lack of any means of focusing the voice so that it appears to come from the actor's lips...

...Playwrights who have had little success in writing scenarios for silent pictures can probably bring some distinction to dialogue pictures, and actors can learn, given enough time, to allow for the vagaries of the recording microphones, and to use more pantomime than necessary on the spoken stage...

...This quality we might call suspense and action through identification...

...If, instead of thinking of the talkies as an improvement on the older movies, we admit candidly that they are an entirely new form, and only to be compared to the movies of twenty years ago, we shall be in a much better frame of mind to estimate the future and to be charitable about the present...

...A secondary torture springs from imperfect synchronization...

...The sciences of anthropology, biology with its theory oi evolution, psychology and comparative religion have taken the real mean- ing out of Christianity for multitudes of people...

...Unless, and until, the talkies develop an instrument for focusing the source of sound waves behind the head of the actor speaking, or an instrument that will so modulate and relate the various voices that we get the equivalent illu- sion, this matter of voice confusion will be a permanent bar to real enjoyment...

...In other respects, the play is a trifle weak...

...3.00...

...projected jumpy and flickering images on the screen concerning the most infantile pranks and slapstick comedy...

...The resistance through the Romantic movement of the eighteenth century to the rigidity of this first thorough- going scientific attitude toward all spheres of life had the salutary effect of compelling science to review many of its dogmatic findings and thus prepared the way for the truly stupendous advance of the science of today, with its far more revolutionary consequences...

...Nevertheless, that particular kind of suspense which is supposed to be the spinal column of detective plays is absent...

...The break with the old agricultural past, the rise of vast, dependent city populations huddled around the machine, the complete dominance of society by the industrial magnate making political direction largely ineffective save as a business aid, show what the machine has done to us economically...

...Another novelty of the play is the value it places on trained intuition as against the trend of scientific dete fiction...

...Even the spirit of such attacks presupposes the impossibility of any such thing as final religious truth...

...The other is because the play comes very near to offering some quite new approaches to detective drama and has, therefore, a deep and lasting interest...

...It gives the kind of suspense you experience in watching a blind man crossing a crowded street corner...

...It is only in the close-ups that any illusion is possible...

...That is, for the purpose of playing up the girl's story, it reduces the actions of the Scotland Yard official to a degree of imbecility almost surpassing that pictured by Conan Doyle and his many descend- ants...

...But it is upon the mind of modern man that science and the machine have wrought their most far-reaching effect...

...All the apparew facts contradict her...

...Yet nine times out of ten, play-readers of today, obsessed by L notion that suspense means only maintaining the ignoranc~ the audience, will condemn as "obvious" any play which m, the impending course of dramatic action clear to the audi~ while it remains obscure to the characters themselves...

...If she were like nine-tenths of us, sh* would let logic and facts choke off her intuition...

...For this there is less excuse, in this age of mechanical perfec- tion, than for the imperfect focusing of sound...

...There was a time during the first half of the second act when I was all prepared to have Milne turn one of his delightful whimsies by having the apparently stupid detective actually blunder his way through to the truth, thus upsetting the hoary tradition of police stupidity...

...You instinctively put yourself in his place and tremble for him...

...NWEAL io 5 BOOKS Inventory 'ur Changing Civilization, by John Herman Randall, jr...

...Stokes Company...

...Witness Greek temples as houses for banking firms, and the arty town hall of Coke...

...Leo we sat through m~nutes o~[ toffure~vla]Ie a ~'xIcKmg xua~-m...

...If two men happen to have slightly similar voices, and the screen shows us a distant shot so that we cannot watch the lips, we have to guess from the nature of the words who is speaking them...

...In the field of art the machine has destroyed the imagination of the crafts- man with the craft...

...A certain suspense is maintained during their efforts to solve the crime through the simple device of having the murderers always on hand, so that you keep wondering what they will do next, and if their situation will induce them to commit additional crimes...

...Time and a you will hear it said that so-and-so would be a good pla only the author had not killed the suspense by letting audience know who the villain is in the first act...

...But all these tortures, whether they can be eliminated easily or not, represent the early stages of a new form...

...Thereafter arose the triumphant capitalistic busi- ness enterprises of the renaissance, the Reformation in religion, and the confident exactness of Newtonian physics in the science of the enlightenment to sweep the older world view into discard...

...Opin of this sort completely overlook the dramatic value of wa ing the blind--the importance, that is, of making an audi want to reach out and warn an innocent character of p ahead...

...A gullible and curious public that accepts such products has only itself to blame...

...Io4 THE COMMONWEAL May 29 , I929 THE PLAY By RICHARD DANA SKINNER The Perfect Alibi T HERE are two good reasons for writing a very much belated review of A. A. Milne's detective comedy...