The art of sound pictures (1930)

138 THE ART OF SOUND PICTURES beckoning gesture, or the flicking of a cigarette ash in the direction of the girl, Valentino conveyed his approval or his rejection of the girl’s love. This restrained behavior conveyed to audiences an impression of tremendous emotional power controlled and directed by an indomitable will. Valentino’s success in using this technique of restrained behavior is probably without parallel in the history of the screen. Greta Garbo similarly restrains her actions and facial expressions throughout the most passionate of love scenes. She shows herself always as the cool, mysterious, yet always irresistible, love magnet, controlling the destinies of men. Miss Garbo, like Valentino, accomplishes the extreme of subtlety, which assures her tremendous appeal and popularity on the screen. The scope of the present volume does not permit anything like an exhaustive list of bodily expressions of the various emotions which we have described. We cite here, however, a few of the possible expressions in order to illustrate the great variety of physical behavior appropriately expressive of identical emotions and indicative of the range of this behavior from gross to subtle actions, as we have explained. Compliance A. Gross Behavior I. Illustrations a. Lindbergh ignoring newspaper attacks and jeers of his friends and calmly waiting until weather reports are favorable for his solo trans-Atlantic flight. He ignores the various weaker forces acting against him, but complies with the unbeatable weather forces by refraining from action, though still holding himself fully prepared to act at a moment’s notice, as soon