The Play and Screen
Skinner, Richard Dana
THE PLAY AND SCREEN By RICHARD DANA SKINNER The Screen Captures John McCormack FOR many reasons, the capture of John McCormack's voice and personality by the screen stands forth as one of the...
...A Month in the Country IN PRESENTING this play by Turgenev, the Theatre Guild is giving American audiences their first experience of this classic Russian dramatist in English...
...Her daughter, Eileen, is played by a newcomer-a girl found in Ireland, I believe- named Maureen O'Sullivan...
...His patent simplicity proves a great asset, and, with no obvious attempt at acting, he manages to make the personality of Sean dominate every scene, even when the magic of his voice is not called into play...
...McCormack many logical chances to sing without interrupting the flow of the narrative...
...She wants the tranquillity of the life with her husband, the platonic attachment of Rakitin, the devotion of Aleksei, the confidence of Viera...
...The screen play chosen is sentimental-no getting away from that-but in the perfectly legitimate sense, and so well modulated, so artistically restrained at all times, that it comes to you fresh and strong and beguiles you at once with its mood...
...Turgenev belongs to that general period of Russian literature distinguished by Tolstoy, Gogol and Dostoievsky...
...Kerrigan has a light voice of no small charm...
...Further to complicate matters, Natalia's seventeen-year-old ward, Viera, also falls in love with Aleksei...
...In his general method of displaying character, he is not unlike the modern Spanish school typified by the Quintero brothers...
...Rumor has it that Mr...
...But all such fears proved groundless...
...Whether the rumor is true or not matters little...
...He has always known how to use restraint in the management of his actors, and in this instance, with the single exception of the dragon maiden aunt, he has achieved a masterly unity of feeling...
...Elliot Cabot as Rakitin gives one of the best-modulated and best-poised performances of his career...
...He was one of the first to introduce into Russian playwriting the "natural" style later adopted, or carried on as a tradition, by Chekov and others...
...Under Mr...
...Soon the house will be quite empty...
...There are many moments when the story pulls at the heart, but the saddest moments of all are left entirely to the imagination, and the story is permitted to work out its own simple lines unspoiled by any parade of grief, and in that mood of quiet heroism and resignation which needs no forced comment...
...He was born shortly after the close of the Napoleonic era and lived until 1883...
...McCormack, the conspiracy of playwright and director to keep him his natural self has worked admirably...
...At the Forty-fourth Street Theatre...
...Peter's ambitions to be recognized as a singer at least equal to Sean are made doubly pointed by the fact that Mr...
...That is, he works along very simple lines, never forcing action, and permitting characters to display themselves through mental or emotional conflict with others rather than by the pulling of the dramatist's strings from without...
...Sean is offered an American concert tour and believes it better to go...
...McCormack, when sailing for Europe a few days ago, remarked to a friend, "For the first time I am sailing and yet leaving myself behind...
...Much of this is due to Tom Barry's excellent writing...
...Natalia has reaped the harvest of her egotism...
...He sings, in all, eleven songs, making up a rare musical treat...
...Natalia reciprocates his love...
...McCormack to the last, a few words should be said for the almost perfect cast of Song o' My Heart...
...He returns to look after her children, and in time to bring about the marriage of Mary's daughter against the intrigues of a severe and uncompromising maiden aunt...
...He is, however, inclined to probe more deeply into the recesses of the mind than his Spanish counterparts of today...
...That old love, Mary, comes back to the village, deserted by the husband she was forced to marry, and left with a daughter of eighteen and an energetic and loyal little boy of twelve...
...But that voice is, of course, the culminating feature of the film, and this is where the improved recording methods can justly claim a triumph...
...You have then a many-cornered emotional tug of war, with the restless and unstable Natalia at the bottom of all the difficulties...
...The softest shadings as well as the robust and ringing notes of McCormack's voice come through the ordeal of mechanical recording unimpaired...
...J. M. Kerrigan as Peter, an Irish coachman, and Farrell Mac-donald as Rafferty, the butt of Peter's constant repartee, make a restrained comedy team of the first water...
...This, you might imagine, would set the stage for one of those inevitable movie romances in which the husband conveniently dies and Sean, the hero, finds ultimate happiness...
...Borzage's careful direction, she turns out to be one of the loveliest and most poignant screen characters of many a day...
...He solved the problem by taking as his hero a singer who had once scored many successes in opera, in Milan and elsewhere, but who had retired early to the quiet of the Irish countryside where with an old friend, a pianist, he was accustomed to pass many hours of the day singing away the frustration of an old love...
...Viera, whose budding romance with Aleksei has been blasted by Natalia's unscrupulous intrigues, decides in desperation to marry a ridiculous old man who has asked for her hand...
...The film is a triumph of simplicity and expert workmanship...
...The point is that in William Fox's production of Song o' My Heart-a romance by Tom Barry-the talking screen has caught with rare perfection and grace not only the lovely and sympathetic voice but also the simple and ingratiating personality of the most popular tenor of the day...
...I confess to some advance trepidation concerning this particular film...
...One is lifted very far out of the realm of mechanical reproduction and made to feel the actual presence of Mr...
...He is, in this sense, the originator of a school...
...Special settings have been used, reproducing the original designs of Dobuzinsky for the Moscow Art Theatre...
...Dudley Digges as an intriguing country doctor and Henry Travers as the aged suitor supply delicious comedy, and Eunice Stoddard is a poignant figure as the little niece...
...In his absence, Mary dies...
...It was not an easy task he faced-to contrive a story which would not be an operetta and yet would give Mr...
...On this well-drawn portrait of a neurotic woman, the Theatre Guild has lavished an excellent production...
...The aunt is too much of a type character, unbelievably stiff and cruel, but all the other characters work together in splendid ensemble to the end of re-creating the atmospher of an Irish village near Dublin with singular clarity and grace...
...Mary's pugnacious boy, Tad, brings us another new face in little Tommy Clifford, whose victory over the audience is prompt and overwhelming...
...Guild Theatre...
...It is the words left unspoken, the emotions barely hinted at and the light humor never unduly prolonged which reflect the combined talent of author and director and hold sentiment within bounds where it has real strength and beauty...
...THE PLAY AND SCREEN By RICHARD DANA SKINNER The Screen Captures John McCormack FOR many reasons, the capture of John McCormack's voice and personality by the screen stands forth as one of the singularly important events of the season...
...Their feeling for one another takes itself out entirely in a quiet companionship and understanding during the long hours when Islaev, simple and honest-minded, is absorbed in the management of his estate...
...Another factor in the unusual quality of this picture is the direction of Frank Borzage...
...Whether in the rapid patter of Kitty, My Love, or in the allurement of The Rose of Tralee, or in the passionate call of Ireland, Mother Ireland, it would be hard to imagine a more complete illusion of reality than the screen produces...
...In fact, only one other play of his, a one-act curtain raiser called The Lady from the Provinces, has ever seen the New York stage, and that was in Russian during the first visit here of the Moscow Art Theatre...
...Purposely leaving Mr...
...They are singularly effective in the realistic atmosphere they convey of the hot silence of the great Russian estate...
...Rakitin is deeply, though honorably, in love with the wife of his host, one Islaev...
...She plays Natalia to the hilt, with excellent restraint and much quiet grace, as if in outward contrast to the inner turmoil...
...As to Mr...
...Barry has avoided this second pitfall...
...The substance of the play is the manner in which she tries to keep each of them but succeeds only in losing all of them except her docile and patient husband...
...Rakitin sees the futility of the situation and decides to leave...
...But Natalia has engaged a young tutor, Aleksei, for her son, and this Aleksei bit by bit captures her interest-first by his shyness, then by his youth and strength...
...Rouben Mamoulian has done the directing, and shows many signs of an increasing sureness in the management of tense but quiet scenes, punctuated subtly by gestures and movement which give an almost orchestral rhythm...
...Alexander Kirkland as the tutor makes good on all the fine promise of his work in Wings Over Europe...
...The casting, too, has many excellent points...
...He takes rather more complex emotions for his theme, and without using any of the patented jargon of modern psychologists, anticipates frequently many of the problems to which they have given particular attention...
...But Mr...
...The screen has not been notorious for emphasizing simplicity and charm...
...A Month in the Country gives briefly and simply the leading events on a large Russian estate during the visit of a young man named Rakitin...
...At the Guild Theatre...
...It has sought rather to be gorgeous and sensational, occasionally to good effect, but more often to the acute distress of those who still like good taste mixed with their entertainment...
...It did seem quite possible, even probable, that exaggerated sentimentality, obvious Irish comedy and too much trumped-up action would mar the very qualities which have endeared McCormack to hundreds of thousands of people...
...Mary is played by Alice Joyce, whose frail womanly beauty has never shone forth more eloquently...
...The play is the occasion for the first appearance with the Guild of Alia Nazimova...
...Aleksei, flattered by the obvious attentions of a great lady, finds his own emotions involved and also decides that his only course is to leave...
...She is one of those types never quite ready to relinquish her hold upon anyone, no matter what the cost in misery to the captive...
Vol. 11 • April 1930 • No. 22
