Reel and Slide (Jan-Sep 1919)

REEL and SLIDE WITH THE REEL OBSERVER By Henry MacMahon (Special Correspondence of Reel and Slide Magazine.) NEW YORK.— Quite the most interesting event of the month has been the completion and showing of the Educational Film Corporation's six-reel feature, "The Key to Power." To get some accurate results off this, I started a questionnaire of the reviewers. All of them said it was better than a program picture. Nine out of ten thought there was just enough story and just enough coal. One of them, however, thought there was too much story and too little coal. Without exception, they said the acting was excellent, the direction skillful, the dramatic interest strong, the suspense well maintained, and the central theme carried throughout and delivered with a "punch." The only objector to any part of the film was a shrewd critic who thought the exposition somewhat slow, and at whose suggestion 400 feet was put out of the opening reels. Why this elaborate analysis and tabulation of one picture? Because it is a different kind of picture. If memory serves right, "The Key to Power" is the first original screen entertainment of its length to be founded on a big instructive idea, the same being worked out regardless of sensationalism and with a due regard to the requirement of truth. Of course, the novel with a purpose and the drama with a purpose have long been firmly established in literature and upon the stage. But it has not been so with the picture screen. Important themes have indeed been used — yes, many of them. But the method employed in their treatment has not effected the nice balance of art and purpose that characterized, for instance, Kingsley's "Alton Locks" or Ibsen's "A Doll House" or Shaw's "Widowers' Houses" or Tolstoi's "Redemption." The purposeful films therefore have had an exceedingly limited circulation, and they have failed to touch the great heart of humanity. The best test of "The Key to Power" is to tell the story in a few words. * * * ON the eve of America's entry into war a young army captain is plighted to a beautiful girl, and before them is every prospect of happiness. His father is mortally hurt in an automobile accident. At his dying father's request, he promises to resign his captaincy and to carry on his father's life work. This consists of the somewhat prosaic job of getting the coal out of the mines. But strange events are happening in the erstwhile peaceful district. Agents of the Kaiser are about, sowing dissension and disaffection. The president of the railroad company refuses freight cars to transport the coal. Mining stops altogether, or limps lamely on half-time. It is even suspected that the death of the old operator had been plotted by influences hostile to America. But the young man grits his teeth and "carries on." The high-spirited girl who had loved him jilts him on his claiming exemption from the draft. Making the cut more unkind, she becomes engaged to the profiteering railroader's son, a soldier destined to the wars. Balked by the railroad president, the hero appeals to Washington for Federal control of rails. He obtains Fuel Administrator Garfield's promise that cars shall be furnished. The Hun emissaries, seeing control of the district slipping away from them, essay desperate tactics. Their plan, briefly, is to wreck the central power house of the valley, thereby putting twenty mines out of commission, while their gangs of terrorists use the axe and the torch throughout the entire valley. The first half of the plot succeeds temporarily, Bruce, the hero, rescuing with difficulty the girl's little brother, who had been trapped in one of the mines. But in the end the gangsters are defeated and rounded up by a company of government cavalry ; the girl, who had been captured by the rioters, is saved, and the iniquity of the disloyalists is laid bare. The stoppage of coal production had been engineered by an agent of von Bernstorff's. This man had found a ready tool in the railway president. The latter, ignorant of the deeper plot, had thought only to force the sell-out of the mines and reap millions from a coal monopoly. The profiteer's son, now learning for the first time of his father's guilt in curtailing coal production, withdraws his claims to the girl's hand. Bruce, the man who carried on and got out the coal for America and the Allies, is happily united to her. This meager summary shows a story that stands up regardless of the subject. You, a casual spectator, may naturally and reasonably balk at the dramatization of a coal mine — you may very well feel that such a subject might not amuse you. But put the conflict of wills and the struggle of personalities into a tale of mining environment — view the stirring, significant events in the Alleghenies in the light of romance — and you, the spectator, will be reached by the human appeal. E. Lloyd Sheldon and Caroline Gentry, the authors of the story, went after the human interest, the dramatic interest, and William Parke, the veteran director and stage expert, has realized their idea. Obviously, "The Key to Power" is not an industrial to serve the pupils of a College of Mining as a visual textbook. It is rather a semieducational, a film-with-a-purpose that will interest everybody. Over and above the entertainment, there are two big themes inculcated: (1) the supreme importance of coal, the key to power, as the basis of civilization; (2) the superb American patriotism of the heroes over there, the personnel of operators, mine foremen and mine workers who kept the fires burning whereby Democracy won the world. sj: sje sj( THE big scenes were all made in the mining fields of West Virginia, including many shots of the characteristic operations of the industry and also a striking allegory of the original discovery of coal combined with a majestic representation of its function in modern life. The cast employed was of a high professional excellence. Among so many good ones comparison may seem invidious, but the work of Hugh Thompson and Claire Adams as the hero and heroine, Frazier Nounnan as the girl's "kid" brother, George Pauncefort as von Bernstorff, Stephen Grattan as his agent, and J. H. Gilmour as a retired army man, certainly deserve special commendation. Lastly, no part of the story was skimped or scamped as regards art expense. When the body of the film trade press characterize this first feature produced by Educational Films Corporation as "better than a program picture," it means that the so-called film of purpose is an assured success. I advise all makers and users of educationals and industrials to look at it, for it is hardly too much to say that it inaugurates a new era. Speaking of historical films, I heard of one recently that should cause considerable discussion. The picture referred to— a spectacular ten-reeler — deals with the German Revolution of 1848, and the hero is a character modeled somewhat on Carl Schurz. I shall tell the readers of Reel and Slide more about this in a subsequent letter, but meantime let me point out that post-bellum issues are bringing forward many new angles of historical and contemporary events to be handled by alert picture producers. Among the themes already treated or about to be treated are democracv in Europe, the rise of Bolshevism, the ravages of social evil, the dramas of the small nations (particularly the Balkans, Palestine and Armenia), and the capital-and-labor problem here and abroad. Many of the hurried treatments, it is true, may not rise much above the level of journalism. Yet a lot of good, legitimate, historical stuff will be made, giving the school editor his valued opportunity of cull scenes of permanent worth for his new-fashioned "textbooks." Here's a suggestion to educators in this connection: Why not prepare monthly lists of instructive current films, announce them in the schoolrooms, and credit pupils with attendance upon them, occasionally also assigning them as English composition subjects? For a good many years now the best newspapers have been used in classroom as Current Events study. Journals like the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Springfield Republican, the Literary Digest, are models of correct form and compact narration. The pupil who studies them with the right teacher-inspiration acquires a taste for accuracy and sound reading, and his mental horizon is broader than that of the pupil limited to the storied lore of the past.