The Screen
Skinner, Richard Dana
w THE SCREEN By RICHARD DANA SKINNER Let Us Be Gay E ARE beginning now in earnest to get the crop of Broadway hits that Hollywood deems suitable for transcription to the screen. Up to recent...
...Mary Astor is quite credible as the sister, and all the scenes are run off with a smoothness and lightness which does credit not only to the director, but also to the important mechanical improvements in recording and screening which have become so marked of late...
...But the screen director has every action under his immediate control as effectively as the leader of an orchestra...
...These tendencies have disappeared entirely in her work for the screen—which, if you consider a similar growth in the work of Ruth Chatterton, suggests that Hollywood directors may be quite up to the level of the majority of stage directors in New York...
...This fact may account sufficiently for the notable improvement in several stage stars since the transfer of their affections to the screen...
...The play itself is one of the best, in light vein, of recent seasons, combining a clean atmosphere with wit, grace, contrast of moods, and a central idea of far more importance than its apparently care-free treatment might indicate...
...Some of the best screen products of recent weeks have been plays of this type— Disraeli, Courage, Holiday (reviewed below) and, with reservations, Rachel Crothers' Let Us Be Gay...
...But the very literal and excellent adaptation of Holiday to the screen seems to find audiences quite as receptive and delighted as any of the would-be intellegentsia who rallied to the support of the play...
...In the present instance, the screen is fortunate in having Marie Dressier to take the part of that rampaging old dowager, Mrs...
...The effrontery with which the old lady of the play puffed at a long cigar, in orthodox Amy Lowell fashion, supplied not a little of the character and atmosphere...
...The screen has preserved most of these values, except in the sad case of Rod La Rocque, who is quite as inept in this drawing-room piece as in the screen version of Molnar's The Swan...
...Her scenes with Gilbert Emery have almost the lightness, vivacity and naturalness of the stage itself...
...The actor's work, as we finally see it on the screen, represents not only the director's exact idea of how the scene should be played, but it also represents the actor's best effort, rather than his or her average effort...
...The play concerns the efforts of lady Boucicault to bring together a divorced couple named Brown, by having both of them as guests at a week-end party, and supplying sundry foils in the form of eligible young men and women...
...rule out the famous cigar-smoking scene...
...Recently, however, dialogue has brought the author into his own...
...The Browns, for various sufficient reasons, conceal their former relationship from the rest of the guests until matters become hilariously complicated...
...Possibly the greatest surprise of the screen season is the admirable flair with which Ann Harding carries off the role of Linda—supposed to be the private property of Hope Williams...
...Stage directors often complain bitterly of the free hand which actors take once an audience is in the house...
...A scene on the screen can be repeated over and over again until the actor's work entirely meets the director's ideas, whereas, on the stage, the director's influence is felt only during the four weeks' rehearsal, and must be practically withdrawn during the actual performance...
...Miss Dressier is limited, however, by the fact that movie morals (or possibly Kansas legislation...
...Up to recent times, the process or adaptation to a silent screen left the plays almost unrecognizable...
...Even the famous speech ending "and that, my children, is how I met your grandmother" loses none of its hilarity through a changed audience atmosphere...
...Holiday PHILIP BARRY'S Holiday is an even more exacting test of the possibilities of movie audiences than Let Us Be Gay...
...The entire worth of the stage play rested in deft characterization and amusing dialogue, well carried through by a capable cast...
...His diction is deliberate, monotonous and marred by a strong sectional blur...
...No chronic theatre audience was ever quicker to catch the delights of tripping dialogue than the few thousand movie fans who happened to fill the house at the time I saw this picture...
...The Barry "whimsicality" is already a theatrical tradition—a type of humor that rests as often on intelligent nonsense as on situation...
...The entire case of Holiday is far above par, with one part— that of Linda's brother—taken by the same man who created that interesting role in New York...
...On the stage, she was inclined to become over-emotional and heavy-handed, and to use her quite extraordinary beauty self-consciously...
...Miss Dressier has to do with gruff speech what Charlotte Granville did so effectively in smoke...
...The reception accorded a play of this character should cause a sharp revision upward in appraisal of the much maligned movie mind...
...Only self-explanatory action could be used, and those plays which depended above all on apt dialogue were either discarded entirely as unsuitable for the screen or so twisted and turned and padded with "action" as to change their whole character...
...Then all ends suddenly and happily—as, of course, you knew it had to all along...
...Her voice matches her personality and records with smoothness and variety...
...La Rocque talks in the fashion of a traveling salesman who has about half finished a course in elocution...
...A play that depended on dialogue now becomes a screen play equally dependent on the incisive word...
...Boucicault...
...Without copying the Williams mannerisms, and with rare intelligence and understanding of the part, Miss Harding creates Barry's slightly pathetic heroine in a style all her own...
...She has, I think, grown considerably in her work since leaving the stage—grown, that is, in moderation, in smoothness, in comedy sense and in power to get inside her part...
...Her amazing success in this really difficult task gives Miss Harding the best right she has ever had to be considered among the first rate actresses of our times...
...She dominates the screen play almost as effectively as Charlotte Granville dominated the stage play...
...In contrast with the accomplished performance and speech of Gilbert Emery, he gives one the unhappy impression of being a hastily rehearsed amateur...
...Of course there is one important difference between stage and screen acting which may account for this...
...I am sure that if the Hollywood producers have the courage to go ahead, they will find that a rather hungry audience of many millions is waiting for the refreshment of skilled authorship displayed in plays with quick, intelligent and witty dialogue —not to mention that more terrible adjective, "subtle...
...Norma Shearer, on the other hand, takes the role once played so delightfully by Francine Larrimore, and carries it off with grace and point...
Vol. 12 • July 1930 • No. 12
