Film Spectator (1927-1928)

Page Eight February 5, 1927 and kissed. I have two daughters for whom I have as much paternal love as a screen father need be endowed with, but if both of them together pawed me half as much as Colleen paws Tully I would take such drastic measures to prevent it that I might become liable to a charge of cruelty. Neither fathers nor daughters act as both are made to do in Twinkletoes, direction that makes a large contribution to the general unreality of the picture. A street fight attracts a crowd which does not surround the combatants as an ordinary street crowd would. It leaves one side open for the camera. Charles Brabin, who directed the picture, might ask me how the camera could record the fight if the crowd surrounded it. By having an energetic spectator make the crowd describe a large circle, which could be planted in a long shot, moving the camera within the circle to get the medium shots of the fight. But, in any event, any scene that can not be shown on the screen exactly as it would be in real life never should be photographed. There is a similar lapse in the direction of a theatre sequence. Colleen is doing her stuff on the stage and the excited chorus girls assemble in the wings to watch her. They do not cluster as they would in real life. They stand in parallel lines, to permit a shot being taken between them to register their interest and to show Colleen on the stage in the distance. With the camera stationed in an opposite wing Colleen could have been shown in the foreground and the girls grouped naturally in the background. As the picture has it, it is a striking example of unintelligent direction. The whole theatre sequence is ridiculous. We see all that Twinkletoes does on the stage. She dances very nicely, quite well enough to please a tough Limehouse audience, but not well enough to arouse the tremendous and sustained enthusiasm that the audience registers. The picture audience, having seen her act, knows this. And it has nothing to do with the story. Her success or failure as a dancer is not what the story is about. It is all very silly, serving only as an excuse for several more closeups of Colleen smiling. It may interest Brabin and McCormick to know that men in Limehouse audiences keep their hats on in music halls. In the picture they take them off. And if Twinkletoes is such a favorite that men break up the show clamoring for her appearance, how do you explain a title in a previous sequence which says that often there is little in her house to eat? A headliner who is three-sheeted throughout the neighborhood ought to draw down enough to beat Old Mother Hubbard in a cupboard contest. I have pointed out quite enough to show why Twinkletoes is not a notable picture. And it might have been. In itself it has everything necessary to the making of a picture out of the ordinary. It falls down because it did not have intelligent treatment. * * * Elinor Glyn Picks Winner WHEN a group of four or five people enters a room it is not unusual that one of them attracts more attention than all the others. All may conduct themselves alike, they may look pretty much alike, wearing clothes of equal attractiveness, but one of them will draw the eyes of the majority of lookers-on. He or she is the one with that strange quality, personality. It is something that no one acquires consciously. It remained for Elinor Glyn to put it on the screen, to dramatize it, even though undramatically. Perhaps she will do it over again in something bigger and stronger than It, which is a delightful comedy, but which only scratches the surface of the possibilities of the theme. Madame Glyn in It deals with but one variation of the theme, personality with a sex appeal attachment. At least, I suppose that that is what her “it” is. She seems to have perplexed the world as much as Dr. Einstein did with his theory of relativity. While we don’t know what the two of them discovered, we are quite ready to believe in the existence of the things they discovered. But there is a bigger “it” than a shopgirl’s which lands her a rich husband. There is the “it” of the man of power, who can do tremendous things by sheer force of his personality. A strong drama could be based on it, and I hope Madame Glyn undertakes to write it, for she should not allow anyone else to exploit her discovery. When she first thought of the story for the picture It she told it to Ben Schulberg. He thought it a great idea and told her to go ahead. He assigned Clarence Badger to direct it. Badger took to the idea enthusiastically. So far, so good. Then a peculiar thing arose. No one else on the Paramount lot could see any merit in the idea, which, in essence, was to make a motion picture about the thing motion picture artists must have to make motion pictures successful — personality. The selling end of the organization in New York thought it a nutty idea and opposed the making of such a picture. But Madame Glyn, Schulberg and Badger stuck stubbornly to their conviction that they had a winner, and it has turned out that they were right. It is interesting chiefly for revealing to us a new Elinor Glyn, one with an amusing taste in comedy and who can entertain us for the full length of a feature picture that does not have a single tiger skin in it. It adds strength to my argument in the last Spectator that Madame Glyn has a picture mind and that the screen is a better medium of expression for her than literature. We always will get better pictures from writers who have learned screen technic than from screen technicians who try to write. * * * Nothing in “It” to Make You Mad Dealing with the subject of authors in pictures in the last issue, I said that when authors supervised the making of pictures based on their stories we would have no more pictures that would make us mad, even though there might be many that we do not like. Such pictures would be free from all the absurdities that are so much in evidence now. It is a picture supervised by the writer of its story and there is nothing in it that affronts the intelligence. Even those who do not like it can not charge it with being illogical, silly or senseless, ills which afflict so many screen offerings. But I can not imagine anyone not liking it. The story has been told many times before on the screen, but this time it has been motivated differently and the whole thing has been treated so intelligently that it is delightful entertainment. Of course there are the usual senseless close-ups, which can be attributed to the editing and not to the story or the direction. Tony Moreno, William Austin and the captain of a yacht stand close together on deck and talk. It is shown entirely in close-ups, losing all its pictorial value. A group of three smartly dressed men on the deck of a trim yacht gives the cameraman an opportunity to pro