Celluloid : the film to-day (1931)

CIMARRON 155 all of the cinema even up till the coming of dialogue, before literary speech was introduced to stultify action. Many of these early films of pace were extremely well cut, not because their editors were aware of any principles of short or long cutting, but because they cut purely in terms of movement. In addition to which, these primitives presented the opportunity for showing the space and limitless horizons which have always been familiar to the American mind. Westerns continued to be made even when sex-plots and living-in-sin stories occupied the minds of progressive producers, and because America was dealing with sentiments and social levels about which it knew all there was to know, the Westerns were on the whole very well made and extremely popular. But not until 1923, when Paramount conceived the idea of making The Covered Wagon on a big scale and James Cruze turned it into the first American epic Western, did the American producers realize what a strong appeal real material had for the filmgoing public. I have explained elsewhere how Cruze's film started the ball rolling for boy-and-girl romances set against a natural background, and I would augment this by drawing attention to the successful revival of the Western during the last few years. It would have been supposed that the success attending Cruze's The Covered Wagon would have led Paramount to continue with the production of these pioneer films, but at that time it was deemed essential for American pictures to deal with subjectmatter of universal consequence, in which category the stories of the Great West did not fall. Their