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THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSAL APPEAL 25
throughout, will have definite influence on the situation. The significance of Chaplin's City Lights in this respect will be dealt with at a later stage, but it may be said now that Chaplin is a shrewd showman to produce what is ostensibly a silent film in the midst of an army of dialogue pictures.
Not for a moment, however, do I suggest that the silent film will ever return to public favour. The great achievements of the silent cinema will in all probability continue to be shown at specialist repertory cinemas, as indeed they deserve to be for the benefit of rising generations; but contemporary production will be completely concerned with the conjunction of sound and image in a new form of film that will possess universal appeal. As far as I am aware, no material example of this type of sound film exists to-day. There has not yet been made a film in terms of sound and visual images without the interruption of speech. The nearest approach, perhaps, lies in some synchronized versions of silent films, such as The White Hell of Pitz Paluy but these have not included naturally recorded sound interwoven with the musical score.
Every month brings a new and more stimulating Disney sound cartoon to the cinema and still, after all this time, no director or producer has learned the obvious lesson from these superb masterpieces of sound and visual rhythm. Such a magnificent example of what lies to be achieved in the sound medium as The Skeleton Dance passes by unheeded. We hear the chariot race in the synchronized version of Ben-Hur, the machine-guns in All Quiet on the Western Front, the aeroplanes in Hell's Angels, the accordion in Sous