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228 CELLULOID
Edgar Rice Burroughs and Herbert Strang, not to speak of the multitude of thrills contained in penny dreadfuls and shilling shockers.
Alas, such crazy flights of our fancy had perforce to remain dreams, incapable of taking actual form. The ingenious ideas of such entertaining writers were confined between the covers of our beloved books, expanding into realization only in the boundless but unsatisfying realms of our imagination. But in the course of time, as seemingly impossible things have happened all round us, we have stopped and wondered as one by one the wildest conceptions of our youth have assumed concrete shape in everyday life. Giant flying boats like the Dornier Do. X, enormous airships like the Graf Zeppelin, marvels of television, long-range howitzers, wireless, and innumerable other products of scientific and mechanical invention have become commonplaces. From his yacht in the Mediterranean Signor Marconi switches on the electric lights of Sydney in Australia. Conversations take place hourly between people in America and people in London. Racing seaplanes travel at over three hundred and fifty miles an hour. No longer do we receive any thrill in reading about these things. Instead we marvel at still more extraordinary ideas as they take form in the dark interior of the cinema.
I am surprised that the film is not more often used to present the extreme flights of imagination. The very nature of the medium suggests its unlimited possibilities. Yet little real advantage has so far been taken of the cinema's unique facility for the rendering of the fantastic.