Motion Picture Classic (Jan-Aug 1919)

CLASSIC Griffith Renews Old Promises {^Continued from page 23) the film that was going to show the routine directors what the master could do in their medium. But since then have come “The Greatest Thing in Life,” “A Romance of Happy Valley,” “The Girl Who Stayed at Home” and finally “Broken Blossoms.” While the first three have lots of the old sure-fire tricks — races, rescues, robberies, sudden business failures — there is a smooth, consistent finish to them, there is power without pretentiousness, and there is more and more of the human. “Broken Blossoms” is a remarkable rule unto itself. None except “Broken Blossoms” has — or even attempts — that economical close-cut technique which Ince and Neilan and Tucker have made characteristic of the best in the photoplay. But they all have the Griffith quality of weaving a vast number of threads into a single design, and in three or four spots they have some things that mean much for the art of the movies. These have nothing to do with Griffiths’ genius as a coach, as an inventor of business, or as a remarkable senser of the popular taste. One is a matter of characterization, the other of technique. In “The Greatest Thing in Life,” Griffith gave desperate and disillusioned admirers of the screen the hope that characterization might compete with plot. There he won his audience not half so much by the brilliant battle scenes as by the interesting picture of a rich young snob falling in love with a “common little girl” and admitting her commonness along with his love. In “A Romance of Happy Valley” he got clear away from “long shots” and thousands of actors and enriched his canvas with portraits of small-town people, including a young gawk for a hero and a potential old maid for a heroine. He couldn’t trust his audiences to love this as they actually did, and he gave the story a melodramatic “trick” ending; but he did characterize, and he did the same thing to a certain extent in his next, “The Girl Who Stayed at Home.” Far more interesting and far more important was Griffith’s introduction of the “softfocus” of art photography, first in “The Greatest Thing in Life.” Griffith is always experimenting with new technical efects. He tried color in “Intolerance,” blacked-out horizons in “Hearts of the World,” night photography in “The Great Love” and a translucent screen lit from behind in “Broken Blossoms.” Most of these departures, however good, .have not been worth the trouble, because of the contrast between the new treatment and the old which Griffith has been content to permit in juxtaposed scenes. There was something of this same contrast, a great deal, in fact, in his “soft focus” close-ups in “The Girl Who Stayed at Home,” but the effect was only to point the splendid possibilities in the new method. There were a dozen really beautiful close-ups in this film. The composition (Eighty -three) and the lighting, as well as the softened treatment, made those mastodonic faces, for the first time, something besides offensive or merely exciting. At one point the soft-focus was used, however, not so much to give beauty as to heighten emotion, and the result was astonishing. A soldier was parting from a little cabaret dancer, just before he sailed. She was entertaining him at supper in her room, and we looked across the table at her, as he was doing. We saw more than he did, of course, for in this strange, soft, almost vague view of her thru the new lens we caught both the frail, ephemeral quality of the girl and hysterical, nervous fervor with which she loved, the flame of desperate devotion that had been set burning in her. It is an almost impossible thing to describe, but the emotion of that face was many times more keen and visible because of its removal from the exact reality of ordinary, sharp motion picture photography. The realization of this became a dreadful certainty when the brief close-up was over and we flashed to both figures. All we. found was the stupid, harsh reality of the physical man and the physical girl and all the hundred details of the room and food and clothes. Suddenly we saw again that close-up, its emotion — and its possibilities. These possibilities Griffith has plumbed almost to their depths in “Broken Blossoms.” The result is the only fundamental and important contribution to the advance of the photoplay made in four years. Even in “Broken Blossoms,” however, Griffith has almost succeeded in getting us off the trail of his best work by a lot of elaborate tricks of presentation which are largely specious and certainly have nothing to do with the two fundamental virtues of the film — its photographic departures and its simple and tragic characterization. A great deal of bosh has been written about Griffith’s trick of staining shadows blue or pink by throwing a light from the back of a translucent screen. It is interesting enough. It gives a tinting and toning with living light far more striking than any attained by dyes. But it creates, in my opinion, no permanent values greater than the beauties of Mr. Bitzer’s own photographic shadows, and it has the same failing as Griffith’s other attempts to use color in parts of “Intolerance” and night photography in parts of “The Great Love.” The scenes thus treated stand out as if they were in another medium and lose all proper structural relationship to episodes in the same settings projected in the ordinary manner. There is an emotion in light-tinted scenes which Griffith manifestly aims at, but there is an emotional and intellectual contrast far greater than smoothness of story can permit. Moreover, the brilliant blue of the shadows distracts the eye from what should be the center of attention, the high lights of the human faces. But the failure or virtue of this trick is nothing compared to the splendid experi I Must Jiave^ More Money How Coal (jet It? « • Thousands of women everywhere are saying that every day. 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