The educational screen (c1922-c1956])

418 The News Chat The Educational Screen The News Chat {Continued from page 415) of production money either England, France, Italy or Germany could put out pictures artistically far superior to the present average American product. America might not like these pictures, but the real art would be there. America might prefer to continue on its present menu of silly stuff. America is youth mad. American fans would rather see a pretty school girl or handsome young male pose through six reels of emptiness than view a film with a serious thought enacted by persons old enough to know something about acting. It .has been fondly supposed by many in this country that American movies are Americanizing the world. But America is not imposing culture on the world in this manner. The culture exemplified by the average American photoplay is too shallow to make a lasting impression abroad. IN "Arts and Decoration" for September, Mr. D. W. Griffith writes on the subject, "Are the Movies Destroying Good Taste?" The approximate gist of this article would seem to be as follows: Mr. Griffith admits that the "rooms of the rich" on the screen "are crowded with masses of misplaced magnificence, like a furniture shop or an auctioneer's showroom." This interferes seriously with the development among the movies' vast audiences of a true "sense of beauty," which Mr. Griffith thinks is the great end the screen should achieve. Then we learn that this sort of stage-setting is all quite necessary or the producer will lose money — which would seem quite fatal to the development above-mentioned. Still, "if occasion offers, he will tempt the lightning of the gods" and try photographing a room furnished in good taste. Diminished returns at the boxoffice are thus rated as "lightning of the gods," the accepted phrase for the supreme disasters that can overtake human life. One can fancy that it would be hard to find an "occasion" to justify such risks. To summarize, the taste of the movies is bad, but it has to be bad or the financial results will be worse, yet the movies should do their best to promote a "sense of beauty." Mr. Griffith then gives still more space to a sort of cultural catalog of the surroundings in his own boyhood home, where his father's "orotund voice poured forth the music of Keats and Tennyson and Shakespeare" in rooms of impeccable taste and beauty, in a house adorned exclusively with "forceful pictures, all portraits" of Lincoln, Emerson, Washington, Lee, Grant, Roger Williams, Thomas Paine, and Rousseau. "Every picture was an epic." At first we did not see the connection between these autobiographical data and the subject of the article, but concluded that they were given as evidence of Mr. Griffith's qualification to speak authoritatively on matters of taste. And this leads us to place next in this column the following note. THE Saturday Evening Post recently printed an article, "My Crystal Ball," by Elizabeth Marbury in which she records memories of her own remarkable career in the world of Art and Letters. We quote two paragraphs: "The list of men who contributed to the glory of the French stage in those days would be incomplete without including Pierre Decourcellc, the nephew of D'Ennery, who was the author of the Two Orphans. Although successful as a dramatist, he has devoted himself in later years to the making of moving pictures, so that he is now preeminent in the world of films. "Decourcelle was and still is a very handsome man. He is a familiar figure everywhere; not only in the theater but at every private art view in the Rue de Seize, at the Hotel Drouot when important auction sales are in progress, at Longchamp on the day of the Grand Prix, at Auteuil, in Deauville when the season is at its height, in the most exclusive salons of Paris; in fact, Pierre Decourcelle is in all and over all. He is noted for his marvelous taste, for his knowledge as a collector, for his own overwhelming energy and for his universal courtliness." The outstanding need of motion pictures in America — and about the only one, as we see it — is some serious attention from men and women of the character and quality of Decourcelle, at the producing end of the business. A few of them have tried it. but they were so few that they were too lonesome to endure life in moviedom. A few more — ' enough so that they could feel each other's presence in the great task — could bring the motion nicture into its own. Some day they will. I