The Screen
Skinner, Richard Dana
266 THE COMMONWEAL July 2, 1930 THE SCREEN By RICHARD DANA SKINNER The Movietone Follies THE New Movietone Follies of 1930 are not—as one might suspect—presentations of stars in the...
...The screen method avoids this, and keeps the audience's viewpoint constant...
...Really enjoyable dancing meant the pink tights and fringed skirts of the ancient ballet in some such environment as The Soul Kiss...
...But to make this possible, the audience had to be reasonably accomodating and imagine itself as two separate audiences...
...To the austere lover of art, the symphonic medleys and the tinseled ballets take rank among the major atrocities of our times...
...This young man is a product of the talking movie, and a credit to the medium...
...This emphatically does not imply any unbounded enthusiasm for the current screen product, nor any loss of affection for what the older theatre can do when intelligently handled...
...If you want to see real distinction in commonplace disguise—remember Jack Oakie...
...Beauty of design and passenger comfort came only after the main mechanical difficulties had been mastered...
...The really important thing, then, is to catch, even in a mediocre film, such as the Movietone Follies, those features which suggest lines of future progress and a further emancipation from the rigid limits of theatrical technique...
...Yet—in all earnestness—I cast a hearty vote in favor of them...
...The nearest approach we have seen to this method on the legitimate stage was Burlesque, which, under Arthur Hopkins's skilled guidance, successfully presented scenes from a musical review within the structure of a play...
...Then, by a twist of the plot, the entire musical comedy company is brought to a country estate for a benefit performance...
...He is, furthermore, an artist—one whose comedy sense would not be complete without audible speech...
...A combination between play and musical comedy, they offer, in the conventional gray and white, modest and sprightly entertainment with a sprinkling of reasonably good wisecracks...
...Even the stories of some of the Greek tragedies would lend themselves well to a double plane treatment of men and gods...
...The other day, I sat in one of these vast palaces and witnessed a condensed version of Carmen...
...What I am endeavoring to do during these transition months in talking-screen development is to pick out, from this film and that, certain points significant of future promise...
...We shall see some of the imaginative flashes of King of Jazz projected into folklore tales, stories of the giants for young people, and the Wagnerian operas...
...Taking the music first—under what other circumstances could 6,000 persons, not of the erstwhile music-loving class, be persuaded to attend a performance of a Wagnerian overture...
...If, with all this, a slow education is proceeding, a complex against "classical" music is being removed, an intimacy with the finer emotions of the great composers is being achieved, then the price of a little cheap showmanship is rather small to pay for the result reached...
...The visual effect was rather like a Christmas tree, the singing, except for the guest star, was not above the grade of a small Italian city...
...A year from now—and certainly within two years—we shall be seeing more and more evidences of distinguished effort on the screen, more pictures of the calibre of Disraeli, Journey's End and All Quiet on the Western Front...
...What if the spotlights do play on the back of the orchestra leader, what if red, purple and violet lights do weave across the curtained background, what if charlatanism does pop out in the overplaying of the brasses and drums...
...If movie revenues have served to endow this sort of education, it is high time to give credit where it is due...
...His characterization is superficially obvious, but underscored with a subtlety all too rare on either stage or screen...
...Mechanical improvement was naturally the first concern of the automobile makers...
...But the rapt attention of a huge audience—not 200 of whom had probably ever ventured through the doors of the Metropolitan—was something to arrest one's thoughts...
...The same process is going on in the ballet and the dance...
...The Social Lion THE chief reason for writing about The Social Lion is Jack Oakie...
...There has been too much wholesale condemnation of the "talkies," based solely on the obvious crudities of present methods...
...But an entire entertainment industry has grown up around the screen which, for weal or woe, is having its effect upon hundreds of thousands of patrons...
...We shall also see the movie producers, forced by the necessities of dialogue, granting more and more rights to the skilled creative author...
...Even his wise-cracks are delivered with a precision of timing and emphasis which few Broadway stars possess...
...Here, freed from the conventional theatre settings, several of the musical show numbers are run through merrily...
...Thousands of persons, daily, are discovering that Tchaikowsky is not a name to inspire terror or boredom, that Wagner can be more richly inspiring even than Irving Berlin, that Debussy can cast a spell, that Cesar Franck can evoke majesty even in the heart of a dry-goods clerk...
...The answer is decidedly no—if we are to measure the screen solely by present productions...
...By-Products of the Movies IT IS about time to break a lance in defense of the gaudy trappings which surround motion picture presentation in our larger palaces...
...266 THE COMMONWEAL July 2, 1930 THE SCREEN By RICHARD DANA SKINNER The Movietone Follies THE New Movietone Follies of 1930 are not—as one might suspect—presentations of stars in the manner of King of Jazz...
...It is this greater logic inherent in screen method, as shown in symptomatic flashes, which promises the most for future development...
...These Follies begin as a fairly trite story of the rich young man in love with a musical comedy star...
...The first half of the picture has only dialogue...
...What they do illustrate is the great technical freedom which the screen permits in the structure of a story...
...Today, hundreds of thousands have learned to enjoy plastic dancing of the highest order...
...It is easy enough to say that the voices often reproduce harshly, that a great part of the dialogue is banal and pointless, that many of the actors have incomparably poorer diction than those trained in stage traditions, and that many of the plays based on good stage originals are sadly butchered to meet the level of the "movie mind...
...Less than fifteen years ago, hardly one in that audience would have cared to hear anything more profound than a version of The Pink Lady...
...Again it is only fifteen years since Pavlova and her Russian ballet were popularly regarded as "high brow...
...Ballets and symphony orchestras have, strictly speaking, nothing to do with the movies...
...Because of a number of sympathetic comments, such as this, on the new talking screen, I have been asked whether I have actually become a "convert" to the screen as against the stage...
...He is also an actor...
...To put it mildly, he is a personality...
...But that is very much like estimating the future utility of the automobile from the performance and break-downs of the early two cylinder horseless carriages...
...The talking pictures, right now, are more concerned with mechanical experiment, and with discovering their own scope, than with refinements of the showmaster's art...
Vol. 12 • July 1930 • No. 9
