The Screen Guilds’ Magazine (November 1934)

November , 1934 7 When the Body Depicts the Mood By Ralph Bloeh Drawing by Harry B. Johnson N OT merely the expressiveness of the face and voice but the fluent lines of the whole body expressing a mood deeply wedded to the dramatic moment: it was this which the speaking stage at its best gave to the audiences of the theatre. The greatness of Lucien Guitry, the father of Sascha and unhappily now only a theatrical memory, lay in his gift for lifting audiences into a deep and possessing emotion, with his back turned to the pit and not a sound coming from his mouth. It is this plastic element of the art of acting which only now seems to be find¬ ing a place in the motion picture. Who can be blamed for this tardy arrival of one of the most important elements of the theatre? Probably neither actors, directors nor camera men can be held ac¬ countable to any great degree. All human processes, and the arts especially, are caught in the grip of modes and habits which only wear off with the countless repetitions of time. The closeup habit is one of these—a habit which has had its distinguished use in many instances but has operated to keep all three craftsmen on the set from exploring the theatric and emotional possibilities of the full figure shot. Only Chaplin, as you look back down the avenue of cinematic de¬ velopment, used his body to give full meaning to his ideas. And because Chap¬ lin dealt in comedy, in truth the most difficult of all the arts of the theatre, the dramatic actor ignored the capacities of the skeletal frame and its muscles for symbolic heightening of the presentation. In the theatre, the Barrymores more than once drew out of an otherwise placid moment on the stage something that became rife with drama, merely by a twist of the shoulder, an elongation of the line from the shoulder to the hip. Only Lionel, of the three, seemed to un¬ derstand that this kind of craftsmanship could be carried over into the motion picture. Sometimes there have been glimpses of it in Shearer, Hepburn, Harding, Hopkins, Colbert, Zazu Pitts— often more than a glimpse in Spencer Tracy, potentially one of the great actors of the screen. Eobert Montgomery, Po¬ land Young, Chester Morris, Frederick March, all have utilized it in varying de¬ grees. Eobinson was a master of it on the speaking stage and seems to have re¬ turned to a touch of it in his more re¬ cent pictures. Helen Hayes and Eliza¬ beth Bergner, both small women, know all the tricks of perspective in space and can become six feet tall for you if you demand it. But the truest and most telling exposi¬ tion of the method by which the plastic¬ ity of the body can bring a moment on the screen to that high theatrical pitch which is its reason for being, may be found in two recent ‘ 4 musicals/ ’ This should not be unexpected; certainly music and the rhythm of the human body should go together. It should be even less strange that a dancer might use the method with fine effect. In this case it is Fred Astaire, who in 4 4 The Gay Divorcee’ 7 not only dances in more con¬ ventional moments with captivating skill, but “ dances ” in a more subtle way in the moments when he is acting, lends the motion of his trained muscles to every mood of the scene he plays. It may be unconscious on his part. But surely it is not done unconsciously by Grace Moore, who brings this use of the actor’s art to its fine flower in 4 4 One Night of Love.” The climactic scene of this pic¬ ture, when Moore as Cho-Cho-San goes up the steps from the wings to the stage and by a complete transformation of her body as she comes down stage shows her renewed hope and belief in living, is one of the great moments of the modern screen. Here the music of the orchestra and of a beautiful voice, the rhythm of the dramatic idea approaching its high point, and the rhythm of the set design, combine with the art of the actor in its truest sense to give great emotional signi¬ ficance to a photographed scene. All this we can expect from an artist who derives from opera, where all is ryhthm —ideally, at least. It is moments such as these which com¬ pensate audiences for hundreds of com¬ monplace evenings in the theatre. And it is the thrill of coming upon these open¬ ing avenues of artistic advance which compensates those who live in the midst of picture making for all the vexations that attend the daily routine of so com¬ plicated an art.