The Screen
Skinner, Richard Dana
June ii, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL 165 THE SCREEN By RICHARD DANA SKINNER The Silent Enemy I SUBMIT The Silent Enemy as triumphant support of at least one contention I have made concerning...
...The princess (Lillian Gish) torn between her brothers' tutor and the crown prince of a neighboring state becomes a negative little creature, who knows her own mind none too well, and contributes neither the qualities of rich devotion nor proud self-sacrifice...
...From the peaceful pine forests, jutting rocks and turbulent streams of the fall encampment of the Ojibways, teeming with life and incident, to the bleak stretches of the north lands and ice and snow, the film is a photographic record of surpassing majesty...
...The story is a trifle satirical, edged with rather too broad comedy, and is certainly not intense enough, in either its loves, hates or adventures, to inspire the slightest feeling of romance...
...No stage could ever catch such magic...
...The period of The Silent Enemy is "any time before Columbus"— its theme, the fight of the Indian tribes against the threat of hunger and famine—its setting, the primeval forests of eastern Canada and the barren lands just west of Hudson Bay...
...At the Globe Theatre...
...The medicine man of his own tribe seeks to discredit him...
...The tribe has been rescued from the silent enemy...
...Later Baluk picks him up, almost dead from fright, but uninjured...
...In the case of Hawk Island, the idea came too late to help the stage situation, but in time to improve the film version notably...
...No such authentic record of the heroism of a passing race has ever been made...
...Nor is Conrad Nagle, as the tutor, particularly interesting...
...But at the end of the long trail, no caribou are to be found...
...Baluk and his huntsmen return to the camp with their plentiful kill...
...But Baluk persists...
...This general idea is retained in the screen version, but the human interest is heightened by turning the fiancee of the host into the detective story writer—thus unifying the dramatic interest and heightening the importance of one of the feminine roles...
...The tutor, upon whom the story turns, has been made almost a minor incident, pale both in action and in dialogue...
...After all, if you are going to have a play turn on the difference in rank between a princess and a tutor who is "up from peasantry," you have to maintain the illusion of a court circle and its traditions...
...The only hope of the tribe against starvation is to forge far into the barren lands of the north before the crossing of the great caribou herd...
...The huntsmen close in upon them...
...Nagle, however, seems to accept this fate a little too easily, as if yielding to general discouragement...
...They are part of the difficult transition from silence to speech—that same transition which has snuffed out the careers of many beautiful ladies of the screen and given to others a new lease of life and popularity...
...Her artistry is fragile and limited, but altogether exquisite within its bounds...
...The simple story partakes of epic quality in directness, grandeur and proportion...
...He might do well enough in a straight film of modern American life, but to project him into the circle of even a Graustarkian nobility is like asking Mayor Thompson of Chicago to impersonate his hated rival, King George...
...Baluk—the great hunter of the tribe—is an almost Homeric figure, certainly the equal of the heroes of Norse legend...
...She is not a versatile actress...
...Your comedy has to be a trifle more subtle than a George Kelly portrait of the midwest...
...The producers tell us that 225,000 feet of film were taken in all to get the necessary 8,000 feet for the final picture...
...How the north country had to be searched for Indians to play the parts, how old men had to be found here and there who remembered enough of the ancient traditions to make the canoes, the spears, the bows and arrows and the snow shoes, how bits of legend and tribe lore had to be patched together to insure authentic detail, and finally, how equipment and the band of Indians had to be brought through the forests and barren lands of Canada in the dead of winter to wait for the actual crossing of the caribou herd—there is enough in all this to make a story on its own account...
...This is quite easy to believe, if the beauty and excellence of the sections actually shown are any criterion of the effort involved...
...His leadership is doubted...
...Fortunately, it is presented as a silent film, except for the special musical score by Kur Zhene, based on Indian melodies and chants, and occasional sound effects to heighten the action...
...The Midnight Mystery ASIDE from the fact that this is a reasonably good mystery thriller, its chief interest lies in certain basic changes made during the process of adaptation from the stage play called Hawk Island...
...In such cases, silence helps to maintain the illusion...
...Baluk is caught back from the pyre to lead the huntsmen...
...The producers have made it a special point to include no trick photography...
...The tutor, for example, would hardly push ahead of the dowager princess in entering the ball room...
...Her performance is as satisfactory as the acting version permits...
...The stampede begins...
...They spread over the wind-swept plains and crouch in waiting for the oncoming caribou...
...In the play version, the most of a house-party on a secluded island becomes so tired of the talk of a certain writer of detective stories that he stages a fake murder, just to show how different reality can be from fiction...
...The difference lies in one of those simple twists which form the basis of most successful pay doctoring...
...Little Cheeka—a boy of the tribe—is caught in the mad current...
...Certainly the screen version of The Swan cannot...
...It is acted entirely by native Indians, and produced by William Douglas Burden and William C. Chanler in the spirit of an authentic record of an almost lost human era...
...Nature plays the dual role of friend and bitter enemy...
...La Rocque is one of the unsuccessful carry-overs from the silent screen— a young man with less sense of diction than the average run of good amateurs, with a pronounced sectional accent, and a lumbering way of trying to be suave that renders him just a bit ridiculous...
...At the Rivoli Theatre...
...Chetoga, the old chief, goes off alone to fast and meditate and commune with the Great Spirit...
...What you see before you actually took place—whether it be the fight of a mountain lion and a bear, or timber wolves attacking a bull moose, the passing of a great caribou herd, or the treking northward of the tribe in biting blizzards and temperatures thirty-five degrees below zero...
...Mistakes in casting of this sort break up the illusion of the screen...
...This principle of telescoping situations so as to reduce the number of characters and increase the importance of each has often saved many a play from disaster...
...The play was something of a failure...
...And still the caribou do not come...
...The affair becomes serious when one of the guests does actually murder the "corpse"—with the intent of putting the blame on the host...
...The medicine man stirs up the tribe against Baluk, demanding that he be sacrificed to appease the outraged deity...
...He dies...
...The old men and women of the tribe are dying from cold and starvation...
...June ii, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL 165 THE SCREEN By RICHARD DANA SKINNER The Silent Enemy I SUBMIT The Silent Enemy as triumphant support of at least one contention I have made concerning the screen— namely, that it can re-create history or historical conditions with a wealth of illusion which no other medium can achieve...
...As time goes on, they will become less frequent...
...The ordeal proves too much...
...But no outline of the story, nor any account of the difficulties in bringing it to the screen, can give an adequate idea of the beauty and impressiveness of the finished picture...
...Few stories can live up to the word "romance...
...The picture script has been given a false balance and proportion...
...He has also neglected so many details of the simplest etiquette that the whole idea and purpose of the story breaks down...
...A few years from now, it would have been impossible to make, as those few Indians who form a link with the past are rapidly dying out...
...Some of the trouble with the screen version lies in the unhappy choice of Rod La Rocque as the prince...
...At the Criterion Theatre...
...Baluk elects to die by fire, and goes to his funeral pyre to chant his death song...
...The fault is not entirely his...
...Paul Stein, the director, has let Miss Dressier clown a trifle too much...
...He crouches beside a dead caribou, and the herd passes over him...
...The screen story promises to be something of a success...
...Some scenes are unforgettable—such as Chetoga sitting on his lonely rock, communing with his God through night and day, even until he is buried in snow, or the slaying of the bull moose by Baluk's spear, or the dance of the medicine man when he is stirring the tribe against Baluk, or the thundering stampede of the caribou herd, or the thin line of the tribe, barely visible through the driving snow, pushing interminably north...
...Here we have The Swan, adapted from that highly successful play by no other dramatist than Molnar—assets, we should suppose, under any commercial valuation of good-will—yet the screen producers insist upon giving it a title wholly out of line with its intention and its plot...
...The story of the making of this picture is a romance in itself...
...Singly, then by hundreds, and then by thousands the caribou come on...
...But even as the flames are creeping upon him, signal fires from the north proclaim the coming of the great herd...
...The audience is asked to like, and to sympathize with, two heroes at once, with the usual result that both appear exceedingly tame...
...But the attempt was worth the cost...
...She has not only mastered microphone diction thoroughly, but has learned how to make speech add to the effectiveness of her work...
...There is feasting and rejoicing around the camp fires of the Ojibways...
...There remains Lillian Gish...
...One Romantic Night JUST why the screen should change the titles of well-known plays remains a profound mystery...
...That grand comedienne, Marie Dressier, as the scheming mother of the princess, manages to enliven the picture at intervals, but at the expense of illusion...
Vol. 12 • June 1930 • No. 6
