The art of sound pictures (1930)

i62 THE ART OF SOUND PICTURES Pure passion on the screen is not censorable, nor can it offend the taste of any normal person. An excellent example of this effect of passion, properly depicted, may be found in The Pagan, in which Ramon Navarro played the title part. The total effect of Navarro’s passionate adoration of the little visiting half-caste girl was sweet, wholesome, and altogether entrancing to the most staid and conventional motion picture audience. The emphasis which we have heretofore placed upon passion, as a predominantly male emotion, is not intended as an intimation that women do not experience it in real life. Of course they do. Woman’s passion is probably much more profound and all-controlling in her life than is man’s. Yet, the normal woman, successful in love affairs, quickly passes from the passionate phase of erotic experience to the captivating aspect of that same love relationship. Woman’s passion should be shown as it occurs in real life at the beginning of her love affair. It may persist throughout the affair, but it quickly becomes subordinate to captivation. In everyday terms, when a young girl gets a “crush” on an older girl, her teacher, or some handsome young man, she experiences pure passion. For the time being, she does not even dream of controlling in any way the object of her passionate adoration. It is beyond her thought that the beautiful senior or the handsome college youth should 5deld to her in any way or return her adoration. She begins, perhaps, to dress like the older girl, to adopt her mannerisms of speech and action, to follow her about, and even to send her flowers and “crush” notes. If the object of her “crush” is some college boy, she perhaps makes herself thoroughly obnoxious to him by