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33
Repeats Itself
from the stage recalls a similar condition years hearts most of the high-priced newcomers, the real stars of the talkies will be none other of the once-silent films.
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Photo by Pach Brothers
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Thrilled with optimism and enthusiasm for the
life-saving device which, we are told, came jusl in the nick of time to prevent a fatal crash, the gentlemen who make our movies have again gone off their heads.
Point to the dusty hack pages of screen history wherein are inscribed those big stage names which were to revolutionize the husiness, point to the frightened filmites of that day. a few of whom are still going strong despite the effort to supplant them, and your entranced movie magnate will wave you aside with a laugh.
"But we didn't have the voice then!" he will explain. "Think what Ferguson and Farrar and Caruso would have been on the screen if they could have spoken or sung their lines !"
It is a fallacious argument, and one destined to bring much grief in its wake. Ferguson, Farrar, and Caruso were interesting to the public as personalities. So, in an earlier day, were Sarah Bernhardt and Minnie Maddern Fiske. The attempt to immortalize in celluloid the genius of these lastnamed great actresses was a pitiable failure.
Improvements in the mechanics of picture-making seemed to point to screen success for stage favorites of twelve years ago : not only was this in their favor, but they were, for the most part, women in the full flower of their beauty, able to face the camera with a measure of confidence, despite its cruel distortions ; and, it should not be forgotten, they had already reached the pinnacle of success in their profession before the movies beckoned. Due to a number of reasons, of which the advancement of pictures is an outstanding one, no stage figure of to-day has a fame comparable to those giants of yesteryear.
This last fact is apparently ignored in the mad rush to import stage talent for the talkers.
Keokuk and El Paso knew about Ethel Barrymore and Otis Skinner
Elsie Ferguson's cold beauty would have been warmed into longer survival on the screen had her voice been heard.
I'hoto copyrighted liy Barony, Inc.
Billie Burke's infectious vivacity
is largely due to her voice, which
the screen could not make audible
when she went to Hollywood.
before these great Thespians
were flashed on the screen. Who, outside the big cities of the East, knows or cares much to-day about reigning Broadway favorites ?
The public wanted to see, at least once, men and women of whom they had read and heard for years. Once was usually enough. The stage-trained movie aspirant of to-day has not only public indifference to surmount, but must face an improved critical faculty and the skeptical attitude already apparent in audiences to which sound films have ceased to be a curiosity.
"Canned theater" and canned lobster may do for emergency entertainment, but a little of each will go a long way with the fastidiously inclined. If the talking picture succeeds in becoming more than a novelty, it will haveto develop as an independent art ; and the players will have to be Continued on page 114