The Screen

...Cynicism is raised to a triumphant peak by all the sentimentalized trappings...

...Fiske is past mistress at this art of timing, and Ethel Barrymore runs her a close second...

...Romance EDWARD SHELDON'S play, which achieved vast reclaim through the acting of Doris Keane some fifteen years ago, has been revived on the talking screen with the helpful stimulus of Greta Garbo's art...

...I disliked it as a stage play, and I find the talking screen version equally unpalatable...

...Heythorpe is neither a real stoic nor a recognizable type of English character...

...Toward human beings in general he shows cynical disdain...

...The false note in the whole contraption rang from the fact that the play characters had no possible way of knowing what the audience knew...

...Old English, the play based on a short sketch called The Stoic, is a typical product of Galsworthy at his sentimental worst...

...Many native actresses do not realize how dependent comedy effect becomes upon the exact timing of a phrase—upon the lingering syllables and quick turns of speech which give a point all its charm...

...Miss Garbo achieves an extraordinary harmony between facial expression and bodily movement and speech...

...The play is a first-class literary hoax...

...One of his plays, Escape, spent two hours in showing the perfectly natural reactions of a varied British public to an escaped convict and supposed murderer...

...Both play and acting fall far below the standard set by Disraeli...

...The plot, it may be recalled, concerns the memories of his youth revived by a minister when he is called upon to advise his grandson...

...Hence the audience was always disposed to resent the uncharitable and harsh judgments of the other characters in the play...

...This, of course, reflects one of the benefits of the screen as a medium...

...The only character who resents the presence of an illegitimate family in the offing is Heythorpe's puritanical oldmaid daughter...

...For this purpose, Galsworthy uses the ancient wheeze of making nearly all the other characters either crooks or unspeakable prigs or imbeciles...

...He is simply a world-wide type of unscrupulous self-indulgence playing under a rosecolored spotlight and against utterly false contrasts...

...The audience, like Mr...

...The combined prestige of Arliss and Galsworthy tend, of course, to obscure these rather obvious points...

...Few writers can evoke an English countryside with more apt magic—as in The Patrician, for example, where he describes the night view of a great estate, with the distant trees looking like "huge cattle, knee deep in moon dust...

...He has also a sharply sensitized feeling for character and tradition and the interaction of lives...

...Galsworthy himself, was thus able to feel vastly superior to everyone in the play in charity and understanding...

...The suicide meal is greeted by the audience as a masterpiece of acting...

...It is also worth noting that the apparent good heartedness of the old reprobate is just one more form of selfishness—the desire to provide property for his own blood...

...At the moment, she ranks head and shoulders above other emotional actresses of the screen—with the possible exception of Ann Harding in a slightly different sphere...

...The minister then tells of his own early love for Cavallini, the great operatic star, of his discovery that her love had been given too lavishly to others, and of their failure to marry because of his inability to understand how much he needed her...

...Like the art of Charlie Chaplin, that of Miss Garbo goes back to deep fundamentals, and wins recognition through sincere and careful study and expert rendition...

...The earlier scenes of Romance give her an excellent opportunity, which she accepts with quick and delicate assurance...

...There is considerable glamor in the telling of the story, much of the usual oversentimentalizing of Cavallini's character, and a general tendency to exalt romance at the expense of sterner responsibilities...

...This lack of balance and inner stability lead him to devote much pains and vast ability to setting up situations reeking with false sentimentality...

...Her popular appeal to large masses of people is something far different from mere beauty or cheap sensationalism...

...The human face is so small in a large theatre that many of its finer modulations are lost...

...The audience, of course, was carefully shown the man's innocence from the first scene...

...As a screen revival, the most important aspect of Romance is its revelation of the ever-increasing effectiveness of Greta Garbo as an actress...

...The boy thinks the old man cannot understand romance...

...Not the least part of this achievement is her use and timing of English...

...The only character who roundly upbraids old Sylvanus Heythorpe for a crooked deal is a blackmailer...

...I even find that the nature of the piece leads George Arliss to do some of his very worst work—resorting to the most obvious and time-worn tricks as a substitute for true acting and showing a painful consciousness of his audience...

...Incidentally, one of the most interesting developments in Miss Garbo's work is her comedy technique...

...Curiously enough, considering that English is a foreign tongue to her, Miss Garbo is quite as successful in this delicate matter of word timing as in facial expression and bodily movement...

...Outbursts, such as those which Nazimova once indulged in, are hardly a part of her equipment...

...He has, of course, a real power of verbal imagery which gives his portraits of English life' and character atmospheric depth...

...But this feeling and his verbal facility in conveying it cover one of the thinnest mentalities that has ever risen to prominence in English literature...

...But the screen, through enlargement, enables the actor to transcribe the most delicate shades of emotion, of pity, love, scorn, irony or rippling humor, with perfect fidelity and the assurance that it will be seen and understood...

...Toward his own he is kind—because they are his own and not some one else's brood...

...In the end, rather than suffer disgrace and the loss of his "independence," he commits suicide through deliberate over-indulgence in vast quantities of food, champagne, port and brandy—knowing from the doctor's warnings that apoplexy will be the almost certain result...

...This assignment of false values to normal situations is one of the first and most irritating symptoms of the shallow sentimentalist...

...But on the whole, life is pretty much met and accepted on its own terms, as a mixture of weakness and courage, with weakness bringing its inevitable consequences in a way that authors of 1930 seldom recognize...

...But this, I believe, is her great concealed strength...

...Actresses of the older emotional school might find fault with her perpetual understatement...

...Her facial expression accomplishes more than a torrent of words...

...The detailed staging of this gluttony-suicide is the climax of the play...

...Charm, grace and dramatic instinct lack the balance of interior substance...

...Galsworthy's trick on this occasion is'to create a false aura of sympathy for an intensely selfish and self-indulgent old man...