The Screen

...Not all of the happy vitality of this new Lincoln is due tcGriffith...

...It is just one of those unhappy and illogical mixtures which will soon fade from talkie repertory...

...Surely it would not be long in adapting itself to a technique such as I have suggested...

...I am therefore taking the liberty of quoting from a provocative letter just received from Mr...

...A particularly apt case of Mr...

...Washington emerges from most plays and pictures as a bleached cigar-store Indian—always in full dress, never in nightgown and slippers...

...Provocative Thoughts MOST of us are so close to recent screen developments that I feel the opinions of an observer who has long been remote from talkie intrusions hold exceptional interest...

...It is a simple device, but one which links the war incidents tightly to a crisis in Lincoln's management of the war and to his confidence in Grant...

...All the early incidents of Hell's Angels concern the differing attitude toward women of two English brothers, one of whom is something of a cad and coward...

...A little later came Broken Blossoms...

...Pierre deLagarde Boal, whose work in the diplomatic service has, until recently, kept him far from the madding screen...

...The Benet story also avoids skilfully the dilemma generallyfacing the writer of historic narrative...

...Most of the subsequent worthwhile pictures of the silent screen showed strong traces of the Griffith influence...

...This is, in every sense, a masterly picture, in which a superlatively well chosen cast gives admirable support to a fine, forthright and dominant character portrait by Walter Huston as Lincoln...

...Monte Carlo JACK BUCHANAN and Jeanette MacDonald cavort and sing through interminably dull scenes in this picture, without making it either a good musical comedy or a good play...

...One can only conclude that the early seduction scenes are elaborately presented for their own supposed value as sex material of a flamboyant order...

...Perhaps the design of our future playhouses might extend this principle, so that the audience will really be in the midst of what is going on most of the time...

...In contrast to this mistake, the producers have happily used Germans for the German incidents, including the amazingly fine scenes in a Zeppelin during a dramatic raid over London...

...I should think it could be adapted to the screen in such a way that the audience would become, in its own imagination, the character who relates the story in the book, and everything that transpires on the screen would be seen by the eyes of this person and would have its relation to that character...

...Characters such as Lincoln are peculiarly hard to treat dramatically...

...I feel that concern regarding the mechanical development of the invention has diverted attention from the possibilities for new dramatic technique ¦which have been provided...

...In a surprisingly short time, new values began to appear, and recently such films as Journey's End, All Quiet on the Western Front, Grumpy, and Disraeli have shown the edge of really fine workmanship...

...Hell's Angels EXCEPT for a few periods of magnificent photography and arrangement of air battles and Zeppelin raids, this much advertised "multi-million dollar" picture is a keen disappointment...

...Another matter which saps the integrity of the picture is the use of highly typical American actors to impersonate Oxford students and British officers...

...The human imagination is adequate to placing its possessor in the shoes of the character in a book through the imagery created by a reading of conventional characters...

...There is no obvious objection to including women in a war picture, but there is serious objection to including them for no apparent dramatic purpose...

...Since my return to the United States," he writes, "probably because I came upon this mechanical development suddenly from countries to which it had not penetrated, I have found it exceedingly interesting...

...It might tend to mitigate the public's loss resulting from their reading less books (per capita) which seems to be the present trend...

...Both were pictures of extraordinary photographic beauty, in which the power of selective incident was used to heighten both character and story and to create the third dimension of atmosphere and environment...

...I regret to report a wholly wasted evening at what is rather astoundingly advertised as "Paramount's risque romance of seductive boudoirs and bold barons...

...Incidentally, the Sheridan incident is one of the best battle pictures of an older military day that the screen has ever recorded, and it has been executed with Griffith's inimitable skill and selective power...

...It is something of a feat to preserve heroic proportions in domesticity, but Benet has done just that with his Lincoln, etching his crude humor, displaying his full awkwardness and yet never losing the perspective of that patient tenacity which made Lincoln, against endless opposition,, the preserver of a nation and a timeless symbol...

...In general, the most pleasing success of the picture is its complete absence of dull moments...

...Griffith was forgotten in the excitement of reorganizing an entire industry to meet the demands of a new form of expression...

...Perhaps that may be accounted for by improvements in the movies tending increasingly to satisfy their literary requirements by that medium...

...It can translate into terms of immediate familiarity, within the space of a few seconds, two gigantic heads appearing on a fiftyfoot screen, or a whole ballet corps considerably less than life size, making all the necessary allowances for depth and perspective...

...Griffith suddenly launched a new standard of motion picture production with The Birth of a Nation...

...First we have Lincoln receiving the telegraphic dispatches of the battle and wondering how Sheridan, the "fighting Irishman," could possibly fail...

...Benet's skill in weaving both aspects together is the incident of Sheridan's rallying his troops after an apparent rout...

...Illusion is quite as important on the talking screen as on the stage, and British accent and mannerisms cannot be copied successfully by nine out of ten American actors...

...But all of this early and elaborate preparation fades into nothing at all, and exerts not the slightest influence on the motivations of the last half of the story...

...Take for instance a book of the type of Mary Roberts Rinehart's The Door, which is written in the first person and where the action is entirely the personal experience of the individual...

...For one thing, I see no reason why the audience, which is now made to ride on the back of a plane or of an automobile, cannot be drawn even further into the plot...

...By several ingenious devices he manages to keep Lincoln in immediate contact with dramatic incidents of the Civil War...

...Then came the talkies...

...He wrote the screen adaptation of Lincoln's life—and that means much more in the talkies, where literary talent is again coming into its own, than on the silent screen...

...Who knows but what some day its own voice, proceeding from its midst, may make vocal in the action the character which the author intends it to represent, and such effects as snow, rain, et cetera, may be extended beyond the screen by the use of projectors to bring the audience within the scope of the action progressing on the screen...

...To my mind, these possibilities, together with technical improvements to introduce color, depth and relief may make the movietone the paramount cultural influence of our generation...

...It does not compare for an instant in integrity with The Dawn Patrol—in which the Journey's End formula of "no women" was strictly adhered to...

...And now—along comes Griffith, the forgotten one, with a swift, exciting and richly human recreation of the life of Abraham Lincoln, proving that he, Griffith, is as much the master of the new technique as of the old, and piling up still higher the debt owed him by the screen...

...From Lincoln's birth, through his early physical prowess, his career as rail splitter, his abiding love affair with fragile Ann Rutledge, his final marriage to Mary Todd, his debates with Douglas, his astounding entry into the White House and his growing mastery of the nation's fate until his assassination, there is never a moment of monotony, nor a moment when legitimate comedy or homely incident does not sweep the story, both human and national, into full and exciting rhythm...

...Then we jump to Sheridan's headquarters, and soon learn the reason for the conflicting news...

...They are surrounded by so much of the solemn poppycock of legend that their human reality, in most accounts, is on a par with an animated mummy...

...A In the dark days, some fifteen years ago, when "a Mary Pickford subject" or a Theda Bara version of A Fool There Was represented the approximate summit of achievement...

...This is along the line of what I have just been suggesting...

...One of the girls in question joins a canteen service in France—which opens up the usual trite possibilities...

...The aerial part of this picture is superb, coupling as it does fidelity to detail with a fine sense of action and drama...

...I suppose this would be a sort of marriage between literary and dramatic practice...

...Stephen Benet has done better by him, yanking him abruptly to earth, but in such a manner, oddly enough, as to increase his stature...

...In the more pretentious moving-picture houses, the organ is distributed about both sides of the stage, sometimes reaching some distance back of the building, so that when it is played its music surrounds the audience instead of coming to them from one quarter only...

...Lincoln, even as Drinkwater pictures him, was a sort of prayerful colossus bestriding the spaces near the zenith...

...Probably no schoolbook story of Paul Revere will ever include the pungent item that he received due and proper payment for riding to Lexington and Concord...

...Stephen Vincent Benet has a great deal to do with it...

...The touch of delicate comedy mingles delightfully with romance and reality...

...If you will recall a movie called The Case of Sergeant Grischa, you will remember that in the last scene, it was the audience that got shot by the firing squad, just as in the book it is the author's effort to make the reader suffer the throes of the victim...

...Most writers would either have sacrificed the individual to the drama of mass action, or have drawn in the mass only as "background" for the individual...

...Huston has never given a more convincing proof of his real artistry, either on stage or screen...