The Play and Screen

...The Vagabond King is unquestionably a case where the screen has the better of the argument...

...All of this familiar movie soup would be beneath comment were it not for the minor touches and refinements lent by the very capable actors, Sidney Howard's succinct dialogue and some excellent photographic effects...

...Shaw is undoubtedly at his best when his indignation is fired, or his sympathy, or his latent religious instinct, and when the fires goad him on to a leaping attack...

...To add to this, the screen can convey a true sense of realism in outdoor scenes and in scenes of widespread action such as mobs, pursuits and storms...

...Plausible excuses have to be manufactured to get this or that character off-stage while others confer or conspire...

...But an American audience may be justly pardoned for yawning under its programs when something called a play turns into hours of debate with a foregone conclusion about something which concerns the British empire alone...

...It is hemmed around at every point by the necessities of "on-stage action"-that is, by the need of crowding into one room or one place scenes which would naturally take place in a dozen different localities...

...At the Martin Beck Theatre...

...The Vagabond King IN SUCH plays as The Vagabond King, the talking screen comes nearest to achieving a special place of its own, distinct from the stage, in which it creates an illusion the stage can never quite capture, and in so doing brings intimately to life the spirit, fire and vitality of tradition...

...There are many amusing passages, numerous eruptions of the old Shaw wit, and many ideas which, for all their special application to Great Britain, are well worth listening to...

...Shaw, on the other hand, is the apostle of a transient idea- something which may seem bizarre one day and commonplace the next...

...It has long been apparent, in such screen productions as Ben Hur, that the motion picture could make up in flexibility a great deal of what it lost in direct human impact...

...The main trouble lies in the lack of dramatic substance...

...In the third place, its sequences are exceptionally well arranged to convey the maximum impression with the least action and thorough suspense with the least resort to old tricks...

...Even this would be endurable were Shaw aroused to his best forensic manner-which, decidedly, he is not...

...It may upset the intellectual apple cart of thousands of John Bull's best citizens...

...The result is never satisfactory and often tends to break the illusion and to give the audience time to realize that it is witnessing a mechanical play and not reality...

...King Magnus has befen making sundry speeches reminding his subjects of his power of veto-a power very nearly forgotten in the political practice of the empire-and this renders him obnoxious and inconvenient to his ministers...

...For the first time, it is actually possible to debate whether the screen, with its vast flexibility and realism of effect, provides better entertainment than the stage with its one supreme asset of human presence...

...At the Criterion Theatre...

...They are equally concerned with defense and attack...

...They are always radical, for the good reason that humanity is always wandering away from first principles and thus always finds truth startling...

...Others, such as the King's sweeping condemnation of religious education, are in the usual Shaw tradition...

...THE PLAY AND SCREEN By RICHARD DANA SKINNER Shaw's Apple Cart IT MATTERS very little whether Shaw borrowed many of the ideas for his new play (one writer traces most of them to Belloc) or whether, to the best of his knowledge, he invented them, for it is an old and slightly fatigued and often fatiguing Shaw who wrote The Apple Cart...

...The screen has always had complete inherent freedom in such matters...

...I do not wish to create the impression that the play is a dull monotone throughout...

...But speech has now been added-and with rapidly increasing perfection- and so has effective color...

...In desperate cases, the playwright has to resort to descriptions of off-stage battles, races, duels and the like...

...To the ambassadors' complete surprise, the King becomes quite unhappy at the news, foreseeing in the "merger" the ultimate and deplorable end of everything that has made England what she is...

...In The Apple Cart, which Shaw calls "a political extravaganza in two acts and an interlude," he uses the general forms of a play to rig up a demonstration of two major ideas and several minor ones...

...Still another ingredient of this political apple pie is the American ambassador who roars into the royal presence to announce that America has torn up the Declaration of Independence, canceled the sixty-year-old war debt, and announced her intention of returning to the British empire, on condition, of course, that the King assume the title of emperor as more fitting to the new proportions and grandeur of his realm...

...The ministers yield...

...One has only to compare him with Belloc or Chesterton to see the difference...

...In the first place, it captures the illusion of a past age as the stage could never do-and this through intimate glimpses of a Paris whose streets and dark corners and chimney pots were an integral part of its atmosphere...

...It is pleasant to think that the work of capable artists can be multiplied for the benefit of those who live far from theatrical centres...

...Action in three or four separate places can be shown almost simultaneously, thus adding to the cumulative effect of drama and showing with greater veracity and completeness the interaction of events and persons...

...He is a reasonably good analyst in the sense that he can break up a popular idol into its all too fragile parts, but he has no particular concern in putting it together again...

...It is as if the Shaw who took such pains to support the satire of Arms and the Man with drama had suddenly grown weary of pretenses and decided to speak his mind freely, regardless of theatre...

...He is almost never a true radical because he never goes far beneath the crusty surface...

...The thought of having an ex-king in the house, able to speak freely and to tell the truth about parliamentary government is too much for a cabinet which realizes that the popularity of the ex-monarch would be so great as to insure his overwhelming success...

...Like many other films, Condemned means more in promise than performance...

...At the Rivoli Theatre...

...The action of the play is set ahead about fifty years, to permit full satirical impact, and has to do chiefly with the effort of a British cabinet to reduce a clever and adroit king to a position of polite nothingness...

...Add to this a splendid vocal reproduction of Dennis King's superb singing, excellent results in technicolor photography throughout and much expert direction by Ludwig Berger...

...The second act interlude is devoted entirely to a scene between the King and the woman whom England believes to be his mistress...

...Nothing, of course, will ever permit the screen to replace the living presence of human beings...

...By way of variety, Shaw also introduces comments on the control of government by big business, on the ineptitude of labor leaders, on the desire of the British people to think their king a libertine, and on the power of ridicule to shatter almost anything...

...It has suffered only in the inability to recreate flesh and blood, and this through three obstacles- lack of speech, lack of color and, of course, its essential mechanical nature...

...The most elaborate theatrical production is limited, at best, to ten or twelve scenic sets...

...His premises do not start with fundamental truths but rather with conditions of the moment...

...For the rest, it is a rather twisted tale of a convict condemned for six months to the French penal colony of Devil's Island who acts as house-boy to the warden and thereby falls in love with the warden's wife...

...After lengthy conferences, the King finally counters with the suggestion that he abdicate and offer himself as a candidate for the House of Commons...

...That, I take it, is where his lack of a positive supernatural faith plays him a bad turn...

...Condemned THERE are many reasons why Condemned is a talking film of importance...

...They serve him with an ultimatum, demanding that he make only such speeches as the cabinet approves, and that he never again mention the word veto...

...They fight, let us say, for principles rather than mere ideas, for passionate beliefs rather than theories...

...The warden, of course, is made a rather bloated and despicable creature, the thief an utterly charming and intelligent young man, and the warden's wife the beautiful and innocent-eyed heroine whose avenue to happiness is finally opened when a second convict kills the warden...

...Secondly, the dialogue was written by one of our best dramatists, Sidney Howard...

...In England it may be the engaging and novel thing today to set up a defense of monarchy and to launch a thunderbolt at ponderous democratic machinery, to attribute brains to a king and empty skulls to parliamentary ministers...

...To my mind, the answer depends largely on the subject-matter of the picture...

...The strength of his principles or theories depends on the tides of human thought, on the vagaries of popular opinion...

...The fact that she is not, and that the King is the most dutifully domestic of men, merely enjoying a mental change at tea time from family cares, furnishes Shaw with no end of amusement...

...Secondly, it permits a feeling of mass action, of night fury of the mob and of desperate battle beyond the city walls...

...In the first place, in addition to Ronald Colman, its star, it makes use of three distinguished stage actors, Ann Harding, Louis Wolheim and Dudley Digges...

...They have abiding fires...

...Shaw on the quiet and satirical defensive, championing what he considers an almost lost cause, is, by comparison, a dull and long-winded gentleman...

...It is emphatically one case in which the screen goes beyond the point of being a mere substitute for the stage and emerges, strong in its own right...

...The major ideas are, first, that the masses have handed over a democratic birthright to a tiny group of professional politicians (surely not a very novel thesis) and., second, that the British king, with his power of veto and his assured tenure of office, is the last bulwark between the rights of the people and the vested interests of the politicians...

...For rich and colorful entertainment, for the sweeping action of a romantic age, for stirring beauty of music, and fnr full sense of illusion, few forms of entertainment could surpass this production...