The Film Spectator (Mar-Dec 1928)

Page Four making now expensive pictures which under the old conditions would have three years of prosperous life, but which are destined to be out of date before they are released. Instead of producing revenue for three years, they will be put on the shelf within one year to make room on the screens of the world for pictures that reproduce dialogue and music. It took only one reel of The Lion and the Mouse to open my eyes, and in the experience of Warner Brothers with that one picture is written the whole story of the revolution in screen art. It was shot first as a standard silent picture. After it was completed someone thought it would be a good idea to vitaphone some of the speeches from the play. Lionel Barrymore, Alec B. Francis and one or two others were called back, and the opening sequence, which occupies about one reel, was reshot on the silent stage. This reel was substituted for the silent one, and the entire picture run for the studio heads. One reel of action and the fine, scholarly tones of the voices of Barrymore and Francis made the succeeding reels look ridiculous. Warner Brothers had no choice in the matter. They could not release a picture whose first reel made all the succeeding reels hopelessly out of date. They either had to throw out the vitaphoned reel or vitaphone the whole thing. But the vitaphoned reel was something so stupendous as a milestone in the progress of screen history, that it could not be sidetracked. All the other reels were vitaphoned, and when Hollywood sees The Lion and the Mouse it will realize that a new art has been born. Pictures generally will have the same experience as this one picture. Instead of reels, consider it in terms of studios. If Warner Brothers had a monopoly of sound reproduction it soon would have a monopoly of motion pictures, for after the public has had two or three vitaphoned pictures it simply is not going to accept any others. But no one has a monopoly. Fox has Movietone developed as far as it need be to provide entertainment for which the public will pay. Paramount is experimenting belatedly with the General Electric patents, Metro is searching frantically for a sound device that it can use, F. B. O. has an alliance with General Electric, and First National and Universal are trying to find out what can be done about it. The screen has been given a tongue, and has added ears to its present audience of eyes. The new development can not be ignored. Within one year those independents who can not give voice to pictures will cease making them, as there will be no market for the silent kind. * * • Silent Pictures WiU Not Satisfy the PubUc THERE are some people who argue that silent drama is not doomed to extinction, that it has been developed as an art too great to disappear. The weakness of the argument lies in the fact that screen art is not complete, and nothing can achieve its destiny until it is complete. Two great screen actors can reach artistic heights in depicting a scene in which they quarrel violently, but as an exhibition of art it is not complete because no sound comes forth from the screen to make it as real as we know it must have been when the actors were before the camera. The real scene is composed of pantomime and sound, and the screen has given us only the former. As long as we knew that there was no method by which the THE FILM SPECTATOR April 28, 1928 other could be given us we were content, for half a loaf is better than no bread. But now we know that we can get the whole loaf. Will we be content with the half? Before we could answer in the affirmative we would have to make over the entire human race. Any art becomes perfect only by realizing all its possibilities. Sound now is possible to screen art, which ceases to be perfect until it takes advantage of it. 11 screen art were the diversion of only the highly intelligent, and in its present form had been developed to a point that satisfied those it catered to, perhaps it might ignore the tongue that has been given it, for the higher the intelligence the less obvious need be the appeal to it. But screen art is the most universal of all arts, and only the obvious has universal appeal. The indi\'idual may prefer to think, but the mob prefers to have its thinking done for it. Screen art is the mob's art, and it will prosper to the extent that it satisfies the mob. No mob is going to be satisfied with the silent sight of a marching band when it knows that in a theatre across the street it can hear a band as well as see it. There will be, of course, those who would prefer their silent drama to remain silent, but their number will be so small that there will be no profit in catering to it. I am not of that number. A few sessions in Fox and Warner Brothers projection rooms have made me an enthusiastic convert to the inevitability of sound. My eyes have been opened to the facts that screen art as we have known it is but half an art, and that the other half has arrived. It is a subject for fascinating speculation. Directing and acting will be made over completely. For almost an entire reel I watched Lionel Barrymore and Alec Francis in perhaps the most engrossing scene I ever saw on a screen, yet neither moved from the chair in which he was seated. I was moved by the appeal in Alec's voice and chilled by the cold incisiveness of Lionel's as he smilingly lured his victim to his ruin. No title writer that screen art yet has developed could have put into the sequence the quality that the voices contributed, and no actors that we yet have seen could have carried it so far with as little action. Within the space of that one reel I forget the medium and become interested in that much of the story that it told. Either the Vitaphone or the Movietone will appeal as a novelty for but a brief moment. I am confident that when the first audience sees The Lion and the Mouse it will forget Vitaphone before the first reel is over and have attention only for the drama in the story. This assertion is based on the assumption that the picture will be a good one. I have seen only the first reel, and certainly it gives the film a great start. * * * Actors With Voices to Come Into Their Own THE development of the new screen art vnll tend to reduce the importance of the director and increase that of the actor. At present, when a director wishes a character to register without a title that he thinks that another character is a damn fool, he must exercise skill in directing the scene in order that the audience will get its import. In the speaking picture the first character can sit still, his face immobile, and put over the point simply by saying it. But he must have a voice with which to say it. And that's the kick in the whole situation. The other day at the Masquers' Club I saw David Torrence, Mitchell