Photoplay Magazine, January 1921 (anuary 1921)

CLOSE-UPS odiiorial Expression and Timely Comment Seeing is Photoplay, during the late war, n i- • was the first publication in the Deneving. WOT \^ to give tne rea i story Q f t ^ e bolstering-up of French workaday morale. When the Germans neared Paris, and every tide of battle was destructive, the great danger that assailed French arms, and consequently menaced the whole allied cause, was not a crumbling of the front line; it was the imminent collapse of the toiling, supporting body behind, without which the French battalions would have been a tragic, strengthless shell. The industrious agents of the foe were nearly successful in their propaganda for an enforced peace because they had almost convinced the French nation that no one was really helping them; that, beyond a superficial show, no one really cared. America countered that insidious blow, warded it com- pletely, and turned it into a terrible counter thrust solely and only by the aid of the motion picture. The camera was enlisted to show America everywhere preparing—preparing munitions, ships, armies, hospitals, farms, fac- tories and finances. The motion picture con- vinced France that a hundred million friends, just across the Atlantic, were rushing themselves or their products, or their skill or their gold, to the rescue as fast as skill and fearless pluck could contrive to send them. France took heart and held on. The rest is history. There is everywhere abroad today a foe more insidious than Kaiserism. It is a canker of the soul, whereas Kaiserism was a mere lust of the mind. It is the spirit of class hate, it is destruc- tive dissatisfaction, it is unwillingness to work, friend with friend or brother with brother, for the common good of the world and ourselves. It is easy and wrong to ascribe all of this to the spread of Lenine's brand of Bolshevism. It is a plague rising like a miasma from the newly hatching eggs of the foul dead monster of war, and it would have come upon us, perhaps, had Lenine never been born, and had Russia's troubles never been entered upon the book of universal sorrow. Now the motion picture remains, as it was in the sizzling days of war, the world's greatest convincer. Argue all day, and at best you convince only a few. Show the indisputable living evidence—evidence that can be bottled and transported and* kept eternally vital only by the motion picture-—and the most unwilling man on earth must be convinced in spite of himself. No single set of men today can hope to write a prescription to make the whole world well. No set of men is wholly in the right, or entirely in the wrong. Peace, readjustment, material and spiritual progress on a permanent basis can only come by getting together. And men can- not get together until they understand each other. And they cannot understand each other until they are acquainted with each other's environment, conditions, needs, hopes and methods of work. More trenchant than any editorial pen, more suavely powerful than any silver-tongued orator, more incontrovertible than any demand, stands the motion picture. Its service in the war was only a sample, a fac- tory test, a demonstration. It is time now for it to be put to work—high time! It stands ready to serve labor, just as it stands ready to tell . the truth for the employers of labor. Itwill speak as clearly for government as for the governed. Seeing is believing. It is not a question of what you see, or what we see, or what the other fellow sees. It is the truth for all of us to see. Let the screen step forth with the truth, and we shall be a good day's march toward the peace of the world. ■* The Play's From time to time we are impelled .r to consider Master William .... Shakespeare's line, "The play's the thing." It is true that one man's opinion is as good as another's, the casual visitor to a moving picture house being a far better critic of a good pic ture or a bad picture than the authority or experienced observer whose profession it is to write of and about the photoplay. A neighbor of ours—we think he is in the real estate business—was talking about the pictures displayed in a neigh- borhood theater where the bill is changed every night. "The great trouble with the pictures is," said the real estate man, "that there is too much bunk, too much close-up stuff, too much alleged artistic stuff in 'em. When I go to a movie I want action. I don't care whether the star is little Midgie Muggs or beautiful Beatrice Barber. I don't care if the director's name is Smith or Jones or Brown. It is immaterial to me whether Rupert Hughes or John Jay Jones wrote it. Who cares who did the art titles? I don't. But I want a real story. I want it to make me sit up and take notice and not slump down in my seat and feel as if I had taken a Dover's powder." From all of which, so succinctly stated, we observe that the Bard of Avon must have been right: "The play's the thing."