Documentary News Letter (1944-1945)

36 DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER No. 3 1944 BOOK REVIEW Film, by Roger Manvell. A Pelican Book. 9d. There was, if you remember, about 1929 a very good film called The Virginian, quite a large piece of the theme of which was how Gary Cooper's girl friend Mary Brian had come out West, determined, as the local school teacher, to reform the shooting, drinking and general masculine rough habits of the district — to make it an effeminate God-fearing woman-fearing community. A couple or so years later we had the same theme in Cimarron with Irene Dunne starting a chapel and Sunday school and sorrowfully reproaching Richard Dix for his association with Estelle Taylor, the loose woman of the town. This emasculation of pioneer American life has always had a snake-like fascination for film makers; and sure enough now the filmmakers are for it too: here, brethren, is dear Dr. Manvell complete with poke-bonnet, hymn book and reticule to reprove us for our wickedness and wild ways, to show us how to be good little boys and girls, emasculate our films and make the world safe for effeminacy. It's a familiar pattern: there are the "culturally privileged" classes who enthuse over such masterpieces as Winterset and Citizen Kane, and there are the "culturally under-privileged" majority who enjoy musicals and gangsters, action and sentiment. It is the selfappointed duty of the former to raise the latter to their own rarefied heights, to stop them enjoying themselves, make them "demand a more complicated satisfaction" and turn the cinema into a night school. Sure enough our old friend "creative leisure" bobs up again as lively as ever. No wonder Dr. Manvell says of Intolerance, in which Griffith dealt once and for all with the impertinent pretensions of such hypocrites, that it "could not be seen by a modern audience without embarrassment". All this priggishness, of course, is common enough to-day, in film writing too, for this is an age when the middle classes, tiring after a hundred years of only robbing the masses' pockets, are instead concentrating on lecturing them on the brutishness of their pleasures. What is new, though, and very disturbing, is that this book specifically links this patronising view of life with the documentary movement, and for our own good name and reputation it is high time for us to protest. There are, I know, quite a few people in the film business, not least in documentary, who do conceive of themselves as angels of learning bringing enlightenment to the culturally under-privileged, but I can assure Dr. Manvell that that is not the viewpoint of most of us. Dr. Manvell claims to be a "student" of John Grierson, but his attention must have sadly wandered during class if that is the lesson he has brought away from it. If he wants to know what Grierson really thought of that sort of thing, I suggest he turns up the files of World Film News and reads his review of Dead End. Dr. Manvell's book has a very full bibliography at the end and itself consists to a great extent of quotations from other writers. In spite of his statement that his interest in films began at the age of five, I suggest that his approach to films is purely literary and that he has spent more time reading about films than seeing them. To a real film-fan, going to the pictures has become a disgustingly ingrained habit (reproved alike by parents, parson and schoolteacher) long before the childish lips have learned to say "Dilys Powell". According to Dr. Manvell's potted biography, from 1924-6 he was 15-17, an age at which real addicts are somehow getting to the pictures six times a week or more. During that period Harold Lloyd made Girl Crazy and College Days, Buster Keaton made The Cameraman and College, Chaplin made The Gold Rush, King Vidor made The Big Parade, and Raoul Walsh made What Price Glory, all films of a terrific impact. Yet you can search Dr. Manvell's pages in vain for any reference to these films or the effect they had on him (except that two of them are listed at the end). Again, around 1930 he would have been about 21, an eager undergraduate anxious to see any new film, good or bad. The arrival of talkies plus the results of the slump made that one of the most fertile and creative periods of American film making — the gangsters, the comedies, the new humanism, represented by Applause, City Streets, Taxi, Larceny Lane, Manslaughter, Laughter, Get-RichQuick Wallingford, Employees'' Entrance, Street of Chance, Quick Millions, and a couple of dozen more, not one single one of which is mentioned in this book. I think Dr. Manvell has been needlessly rash in rushing in with a book of this sort on a basis of a few years' film going, the study of a number of books and a smattering of film gossip. As he plunges heavily this way and that through the film world he contrives to drop enough bricks to build a 2,000-seater super cinema, and all with the disarming air of infallibility of a pedagogue. A very few of the choicest: — The Blue Angel, directed by Erich von Stroheim, Jaubert continually spelled Joubert ; red photographs black, Song of Ceylon over-exposed, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Joyce and Proust as Realists, the magnificent combination, Venus Aphrodite, and the statement that films under feature length do not need the Censor's certificate. The style of writing has all the grace and sense of purpose of a puppydog worrying an old bowler hat, enlivened by such flashes as "distorts into dominance", "fostered into subjection" and the cryptic pronouncement "the period after the war will be a continuous public event". But nicest of all to film people will be to find an old joke resurrected and solemnly set down in print; "since light travels from screen to audience more quickly than the sound from the amplifiers, the sound precedes the image on the celluloid by some nineteen frames." You may wonder why it is necessary to be so hard on poor Dr. Manvell, who after all no doubt means well and is doing his best; but the issue the book raises is too important to be treated lightly. This book is typical of a danger that is threatening all our future to-day, and progressive movements and the film business in particular — the tendency to take things too much for granted, to ignore the basis of heavy work on which our civilisation stands, to think that human progress can be achieved the easy way ; by the casting of a vote, the election of a party to office or the passing of some benevolent piece of legislation, without the long grind, the sweat, the disillusion and disappointment, the hard work and the failure, above all the hard work, which alone can make any real progress and consolidate it. Film workers who gaily foresee for themselves a political wangle ending in a safe and easy future out of the struggle, behind the protection of bureaucratic petticoats, are as irresponsible as Dr. Manvell who thinks that a few visits to Russian and Continental films and a study of the available literature give him the right to spread himself in a book. It must be added that the book has, in the middle, a very generous if not very well chosen ration of stills, and, at the end, an excellent chapter on starting a Film Society. * For your information I N every progressive enterprise there must be leaders and those who follow behind. As artistic and technical progress in kinematography quickens to the tempo and stimulus of war, " KINEMATOGRAPH WEEKLY" is always to be found " up-with-theleaders ", its well-informed pages radiating perception and far-sighted thinking. Kinematography's leaders themselves know this for truth and turn to " K.W." week by week for information and enlightenment. 93 LONG ACRE LONDON W.C.2