Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1919)

ARY The S n a d o Av . I'. & l'«l. OR. By IAN Johnson THE motion picture ston-, that utterly necessar\ and wholly exasperating quantity, is beset by perils on ever> hand. There are not enough good stories the men who can write good stories wont, the good stories that do come m are maltreated by the directors, the scenario writers make hack work of inspiration, production is made too fast to insure intelligent results, the flighty public demands too frequent changes of bill, real drama is incompatible with the star system. These are a few of the commonest wrongs on the debit side of the authorial ledger. But there is another fault less a wrong than a habit— and a bad one— whose demerits arc steadily increasing. It is the national tendency toward the formula picture In other words as a general thing we have no new storie.^ at an. \\e have the old s>-nopsis, the ancient table-of-contents with a new set of names. TTie formula habit has two forms: the formula storv for anybody and ever>body. and the formula star part, for' a celebrity who has done one thing well, and must, therefore keep on doing the same thing for the rest of his life. The most apparent error, possibly, is the latter. We might consider a few e.xamples. Notably and lamentably. Pearl White comes into mv m^nd Here is a woman to whom the camera is e.xtraordinarilv kind a woman possessed of great personality and rare dramatic intelligence. Pearl White has a stage quality rare enough in men and almost non-existent among theatrical women: repose the only garment of true art. Only a few in the female throne mat glides across our walls can be truly called actresses Pearl White IS such— yet her repose, her black-and-white beauty ail the sheathed power of her, go into these catastrophic serials bhe never does anything worth while, merely l>ecause it is enormously profitable to her and her managers to do hokum mystery and knock-down absurdities. Douglas Fairbanks plays to a recipe of jump, grin and punch I am not sa>nng that Mr. Fairbanks is innately an actor as :niss White IS innately an actress, but at any rate he was the pleasantest. because the most wholesome and vigorous, of our U£hi comedians. Charles Ray has gone as far as he can in rube stuff without committing himself to formula as comoletelv as hairbanks; his name has come to mean bovine eves and a ftickory shirt-or bovine eyes and pedagocy. Dorothy (Jish B a pep 5pecialist--and if Dorothy Dalton does one more txtravagance. I dare say they will pin a label on her which Z^L, u '^ f'x^';f'y.w'fe." Elliott Dexter is the ver%' pasiionate hu4,and who ,s too busy to think about love or Too bpartancrjue to talk about it. Priscilla Dean get* into trouble lackir*. KedempJion." with Ke-rt Lvtcll. i. a well-(olJ Un.e. human narrativ. with a lot of real .ympathy. and almost no unnatural "acting." just as naturally as Houdini gets out of it. The arch-formulist IS that mechanical sinner, Miss Bara. who. if she plavcd Eve would probably vamp the snake until he ate the apple' himself' i here are specialists to whom the formula accusation does not apply— Mr. Chaplin, whose single great assumption is not a character but a sort of dialectic expression; Mr Arbuckle world-ambassador for the equitorial; and until he deliberately jumpe.l from under his Stetson in 'The Poppy (Jiris Husband •' Mr. Hart, the visible voice of an inaudible West. The formula story is much less conspicuous and much more insidious. When I .say "less conspicuous." I mean less noticeable to the ^^■'■■^^Hf-^rivatcr-gocT. who is at no pains at all to svnopsize a J earl White thriller in advance, or tell you just what' Doug will do before anybody sees him do it. What the average theatergoer <locs not rialize. to any great extent, is that he is not seeing artistic tran>criptions of life on the screen, but an endless series of artificially arranged happenings— cause, progress, side events and final effects play after play put together like Ford car after Ford car The thing that makes life so eternally interesting is that you simply can't dope out whafs going to happen. The thing that makes the typical picture-plot so eternally uninteresting IS that everything is doped, and happens according to the dope without fail '^' Vou behold the y. -n principal: you know that ever her vagaries or nents of trust, it is simply i:^ sibic for her to be other than l>asically right on all subjects, 75