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in his least successful films, have that embarrassing sense of something incongruous, brilliant but foreign to the medium, true to life but not to the life of the screen.
Age your Expressionist, soften him by sympathy and experience, and you have a romantic. Indeed, Expressionism, underneath its brilliantly intellectual surface, contained alreadv the elements of romance. Yeidt is now a romantic actor; he is at home in the costume fairy-tale of The Last Company or The Black Hussar, though he has more to give than they can take. Planted among the English drawing-room cast of Rome Express, he takes on the disconcerting air of a naughty magician, throwing the film's Baedeker realism out of focus whenever he appears. But in the hands of a sympathetic German director, who understands his peculiar quality, can develop and exaggerate his very unrealitv — his great physical height, the drawn mask of his face, the rhvthm of his gestures, above all, his power of translating into broad movement and not into look or speech the emotions of a part — Yeidt stands alone as the one perfectly cinematic actor on the screen.
Even so, he can be no more than a hint, a mere example in the discussion. You could not breed a whole school of perfectly cinematic actors merelv bv copying him. The intellectual problem of film acting has to be faced, to be reasoned out and theorised. Direction has been universallv theorised, as is right ; of the two it is the more important. But acting has too often held up or negatived direction to be left to work out its principles by itself.
There is, and alwavs will be, an element of magic in the cinema; which is, a romantic way of saving that it is reality more stylised, more highly organised, more aesthetic than the reality of physical daily life. And until the actor finds the way to make himself magical too, he has no home in the other world that lies across the screen.
Elizabeth Coxhead.
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