Pictures and the Picturegoer (October 1915 - March 1916)

PICTURES a:<d the picturegoer 3 E r.NDIXG Oct. :, 1915. room and freed the Stonemans ; Ben taking the grateful Elsie in his arms. But there was other work to do. Hastilj a party of the clansmen remounted and. making for the log cabin where the Camei'ons were in hiding, arrived there to find the little party at thefrlast gasp, surrounded bythe Militiaraiders, who were succeeding in forcing the door. Suddenly the crack! crack! crack '. of the Ku Klux rifles announced rescne and safety. The surprise attack routed the raiders completely, and t lie men and women of the party hugged and kissed their deliverers. That is pretty well the end of the story. To Ben and Elsie, and to Phil and Margaret, the sequel was a delightful double honeymoon by the sea. To the people of America the outcome of . four years of strife and bloodshed was the birth of a new nation. Lincoln's desire to restore the negroes to their African home was never carried out. The new nation, the real United States, as the years drifted by, turned away for ever from the lust of war and began to look forward to the day when the brotherhood of love should bind all nations together. # # * * D. W. Griffith is a genius who makes and unmakes at will the emotions of the public. In this masterpiece _ of his there is scarcely a human emotion that is not held up to the light of human criticism and sympathy— from the ambition of a great statesman for his country down to the wiliness of a selfseeking mulatto woman; from the desperate horror of a million men fighting for conviction's sake upon a battlefield red with the blood of slain to the joie de MlKIAM L'OOI'KK AS AlAlUiAKKl' CAM£ttON. ••Dr. AND Mr-. Camebon," two r&laa beautifully pourtrayed by Spottisv oo.le Aiken and Josephine Crowd 1. vivre of a loving and beloved little girl. We are introduced to every conceivable sphere of life and to every possible class and type of American men and women. Scenes change with the velocity of lightning; one moment the scene extends over miles of battlefield and myriads of sprawling, crouching human forms, the next we see only a face — the face of a young girl with tears in her eye and on her cheek — and we are absorbed in personal emotion. It's Wonderful Fascination. The variety and the minuteness of detail in this play are no less wonderful than the uniformity and compactness of the plot. We have seen numberless photo-plays unrolled— films of every kind and condition of charm and interest ; but none quite so fascinating as The Birth of. a Nation, which held us mute and spellbound for a period of something like three hours. Its two acts contain twelve thousand feet of film, but ii has been estimated that more than one hundred thousand feet of negative film was exposed and developed in the making of the picture, which cost £100.000and took eight months to produce. No fewer than eighteen thousand people and three thousand horses were employed in its production, and a city extending over sixteen miles was built solely for the enacting of the story. Quite one of the most extraordinary tilings about this remarkable picture is the fact that the faces of all the central figures were copied from photographs of the originals. In the case of Abraham Lincoln no less than twenty men were tried before that famous President could be faithfully impers mated. An expensive set was the Ford Theatre. Washington, for the assassination of the President. The interior was made to appear the same as on the night of April lith. L865, when Laura Keene played in Our American Cousin. This scene, which i-^ screened in a few minutes, required two whole days of rehearsing for several hundred people before the camera was used. As an instance, too. of the extraordinary attention to detail paid by the players, Ralph Lewis, who enacted the ril'r of Austin Stoneman, the trreat commoner and noted South • with a three-inch two months before appearing before the camera, to make it possible for him to appear as a cripple. After finishing the put it required another two month to get his strained muscles normal ag Th3 Sensation of the Season. F t some montiis past /;" Birtl ■,i has been entertaining pad first-class audiences in America at full dramatic prices, and was proclaimed by Press and Public the sensatii n "f the season. We cull the following lines from long criticisms in leading American papeis:— "Mr. Griffith comes pretty near working a miracle. . . . As if by tin* wavingof some magician swand.the great scenes are unrolled before us. . . . In the short space of three hours the audience sees, hears, and feels a period of fifteen years. . . . It lifts you out of your seat and thrills you a the speaking-stage never did and never will. . . . The whole thing was fascinating, terrible beyond belief, because you saw, as the angels looking down from heaven must have seen, all of the causes that led to the Civil War, the bloody struggle in which brother fought brother. . . . It will make you laugh. It will make you cry. It will make yon angry. It will make you glad. It will make you hate. It will" make you love. It is not only worth riding miles to see. but it is worth walking miles to see.:' * # * • * And so we think. And so you will find it by visitiner the Scala Theatre. London, where The Birth of a Nation will be shown twice daily from S tember 27th onwards. Lillian Gish as L't-ii. Stoumsam.