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Griffith':
Harron, the Screen's Premier Juvenile. "The Boy" in "The Birth of a Nation" and "Intolerance.'
By Elizabeth Peltret
ONE of the most effective scenes in "The Birth of a Nation" is a quiet one; a scene without a trace of "dramatic punch," but it remains vividly in your memory after many a more spectacular detail is forgotten. It is the meeting of the two boy chums in a sleepy little Southern town before the war. They poke each other in the ribs, chase into the house, dodge around the furniture in the big hallway, and run upstairs, their arms around each other's shoulders. "Everyone" says of this scene that it doesn't look a bit like acting. Then, too, the light heartedness of it and the peacefulness
of the little ^L B -*^~
town, are in ^fl SL NJL
p o i g n a nt contrast to the battle
where the two boys meet again only to die in each other's arms. The Southern boy (Bobby Harron) crawls over to his Northern chum, and puts his arm about him. It looks as if they are tired from too much play and are just going to sleep for a while.
Since the making of the Griffith masterpiece, Bobby Harron has seen a great deal of battle and sudden death. .Last year he was in Europe with D. W. Griffith, and Lillian and Dorothy Gish, making war scenes for the great director's next picture. One can only surmise the number of times he must have been called upon to die, or nearly die — the story may have a happy ending — but it is possible that he is killed or wounded in this war, counting rehearsals, innumerable times. Also, he has seen real danger, and real history in the making — among other things the arrival of General Pershing and his staff in Europe, for the Griffith party went over on the same ship — and yet with all this, he seems just the same fun-loving boy he looks to be in "The Birth of a Nation." But underneath is a keen knowledge of human nature and an equally keen sympathy. He seems more interested in people than in events. In discussing the war, he said more about the effect it would have on individuals than about anything else concerning it. For example, the soldiers themselves:
"It's going to be just as hard j&J > *or a l°t °f the fellows to come
is— -^ home from the war as it was for them to go," he said. "They've changed a lot, of course, the fellows who used to work in stores, and offices, and "actories. They've made new friends; they're heroes — members of the military caste, you know." He mentioned Service's poem, 'The Revelation": The same old sprint in the morning, boys, to the same old din and smut, Chained all day to the same old desk, dozen in the same old rut; Posting the same old greasy books, catching the same old train: Oh, how will I manage to stick it all, if I ever get back again? Don't you guess that the things we're seeing now, will haunt us through all the years. Heaven and Hell rolled into one, glory and blood and tears; Life's pattern picked with a scarlet thread, where once we wove with a grey, To remind us all how we played our part in the shock of an epic day?
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