Documentary News Letter (1940)

14 DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER DECEMBER 1940 FILM OF THE MONTH EDISON, THE MAN. Production: M.G.M. Producer: John W. Considine, Jr. Director: Clarence Brown. With Spencer Tracy as Edison. JUST NOW, some millions of people in this country and a good many millions more in Germany and other parts of the continent are very closely affected by two pieces of scientific work ; the researches of Nobel, on high explosives, and the experiments of the Wright brothers with gliders. The one gave us the H.E. bomb, the other the aeroplane. It may seem that Nobel and the Wright brothers are responsible for the bombs that rain on Europe. But these men did not intend that their discoveries should be used in this way. Until we know better how the world about us really works, it is likely that we shall often let it get out of order — there will again be noises in the night, no onions to eat, people beaten because they happen to be called Jews, and others killed because they happen to be in the path of a bomb. Therefore films which tell the story of applied science are vitally important contributions to society. Edison, the Man shows how some scientific discoveries were made, particularly electric light, and how they first came to be used. Spencer Tracy is good star appeal as Edison who, penniless but ambitious, works as a cleaner in a New York financier's office. When a ticker tape machine goes wrong his experience as a telegraphist, and his mechanical ability, enables him to mend it. The mending of the machine is well done. Tracy obviously is a telegraphist to this extent : he simply sits intently at the machine, and hardly moving his hands, starts it again. Edison gets facilities to work on the improvement of the ticker tape machine. Yet his first concern in the film appears to be to help a girl whose umbrella blows inside out. She later becomes his wife. Edison improves the ticker tape machine and is paid 40,000 dollars for his work. One felt rather baulked at not being told what Edison really did with the machine, other than that he made lots of drawings. The second half of the film deals mainly with the invention of the electric lamp. Edison, about to lose his laboratory at Menlo Park, goes to the financier for money. The man offers twice as much as Edison needs but wants to have a say in what is invented. Edison refuses to have his work, as a creative inventor, trammelled in this way. His invention of the phonograph— pleasantly treated— tides things over only for a while. He then goes back to an earlier idea, the possibility of electric light. The film treatment of this sequence is convincing and exciting. A lamp is fitted and the switch pressed. The carbon filament glows brightly in its vacuum. The group of workers stand round Edison to watch this new thing. Will it go on burning? The gas-light is turned out. Nobody misses it. The men just stare at the lamp, achieved at last after trying 9,000 filaments. Until now they have just seen the filament glow brightly for a second or two — and then burn out. The lamp shines on for forty hours, while Edison and some of the lab. workers sleep round it. One of the men taps his watch and holds out his hand to another; the wager is silently passed. When Edison wants to light New York, he asks for a concession to wire part of the city within a year — at his own expense. Here the film has something to say about the way discoveries in science are frustrated. For the man who first financed Edison has also a financial interest in a Gas Company, and uses all his influence to have Edison and his competing invention stopped. He succeeds at least in getting the concession limited to six months. Five hours before the concession expires a trial run of the generators is made. Apparently somebody has put fireworks in the dynamos and arranged for a small earth tremor to visit New York at this moment. The dynamos discharge weird sparks and smoke, while the whole building rocks. What actually happened is not explained, so one can only go by what is seen on the screen. Clearly it is something very unusual because all the engineers — who have been with Edison throughout the film, and should know how their machines are likely to behave — scatter like rabbits and hide in corners. But Spencer Edison rises to the occasion, heroically pulls levers and turns wheels, and the fireworks subside. (Even if this incident is historically accurate it could have been made technically more convincing. It can only mislead and frighten the lay public. When things go wrong, competent workmen do not run away from their machines with every appearance of incompetence.) The damage can be made good only by fitting a new shaft. This is finished one minute before the zero hour. New York has its lights, and the financier has his hat knocked over his eyes. In spite of melodramatics and travesties of workshop practice, the broad impression of Edison, the Man is honest. There should be more films putting science into social perspective as effectively as this. MONOLOGUE FROM ^^EDISON, THE MAN 99 Reprinted by permission of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Ltd. My, my, my, I just had the funniest dream. I was dreaming about winter, and it was so cold that the trees couldn't shake, and daybreak froze fast just as it was trying to dawn. Yes, Ma'am, all creation was freezing. The question was whether I was going to stay snug in bed, or get up and see what had happened. Well, I got up — and the earth had frozen fast on its axis. Couldn't turn around. Everything was pitch dark, too. The sun had got jammed in between two cakes of ice, and was working so hard to get loose that it froze in its own sweat. Well, sir, I started off across country to see what could be done and I met a bear. I told him what had happened and he just naturally bounced up and down on the ice so hard that the hot oil welled out all over him. Then I picked Mr. Bear up and 1 held him over the earth's axis, and I let the hot oil drip down. Then I gave the earth's cog-wheel a little kick backwards, till I got the sun loose. The earth gave a grunt and began to move, and the sun waked up beautiful. I lit my pipe by the light of his top-knot, and broke off a piece for myself. Yes, Ma'am, I walked home with the sunrise in my pocket. THE RAMPARTS WE WATCH A criticism of the March of Time feature film at present running in U.S.A. cinemas, but not yet released in this country THIS IS a bold attempt to present in film form the reactions of public opinion to world events over a period of very crowded history. By far the greater part of The Ramparts We Watch deals with the years 1914 to 1919, wisely leaving unattempted the delineation of the Twenties' smug chaos and the Thirties' panic-stricken rush into another war. The March of Time producers, faced with no mean problem of filmic construction, decided not to fly too high. They had at their disposal — or at any rate available — a vast amount of newsreel material, much of it of unique value. With this, the events of an epoch could be authentically picturised — the battles and disasters, the great ones with their plumed helmets or gleaming toppers ; the anonymous victims of twentieth century life, collapsing casually in a Flanders landscape amid smoke and gas, or running in blank amazement from the flaming horror of a sabotaged munition works; and, more important still for the purposes of the film, there were the crowds, jubilant, celebrant, or simply puzzled and waiting; the crowds — collections of black dots one minute, flashes of faces, smiling or sullen, the next; the crowds, erratic and impressive, being the