The Film Spectator (Mar-Dec 1928)

Page Ten properly. I wouldn't be surprised if Marion, who, being an educated writer, must have agreed with all my arguments, insists now upon getting his punctuation, not the studio's, on the screen. Fifty-Fifty Girl is a comedy of situations built on a frail story. In order to stretch it out to feature length some sequences that have nothing to do with the story have been introduced. Two h'ohoes hold up Austin, and Hall cooks too much rice in sequences that are amusing and provoke laughter, but which could be eliminated without disturbing the thread of the narrative. Later there is a long sequence showing Bebe and Hall wandering along the underground workings of an abandoned mine. It is part of the story. The hold-up and rice sequences are frankly interpolated comedy. They are played as comedy and cause considerable laughter. I enjoyed them immensely. The mine sequence is straight story, and is played straight, but the whole idea back of it is so funny, and the titles add so much to the humor of it, that it is greeted with five times as much laughter as the other sequences I have mentioned. In this one picture I think you will find support for my oft-repeated argument that no really good comedy can be built by interpolating scenes, even though in themselves funny, that have nothing to do with the story. Every scene in any picture, be it a farce or a tragedy, should carry forward without hesitation whatever line of thought has been established in the opening sequence. A comedy of this sort keeps the audience always ready to laugh, and it is much easier to keep it laughing by holding its attention on the story than it is to provoke successive and unrelated bursts of merriment. The sole mission of a comedy is to make people laugh, and one that does it is a good comedy even though it be composed of a score of sequences that have nothing to do with each other. But such a comedy is hard to make because each sequence is up against the fact that it can borrow nothing in the way of story interest from the one which preceded it; and it is hard to make also because the separate sequences have to rely upon the amount of cleverness there is in them as separate acts. The easiest comedy to make in a manner that will assure it being a success, the easiest to write and the easiest to act, is that which has a connected story that runs in a straight line from the opening shot until the final fadeout. Others will make money, but they are hard to make, and a thing that is easy to make always will make more money than a thing that is hard to make. But getting back to Bebe's latest picture, I would like to tip off my exhibitor readers to the fact that they need not be afraid of Fifty-Fifty Girl. Bebe is delightful in it and displays a great deal of downright cleverness. Hall and Austin are splendid and the production is a notable one. THE FILM SPECTATOR May 12, 1928 the Russians are making. The fact that the story is too morbid to make the picture popular over here is not important. The thing that interests Hollywood is the manner in which it is told. The acting, direction, lighting, photography and production are quite as good as we find in our best American films, which make them better than we find in ninety per cent, of ours. I was in no position to judge of the story-telling ability of the makers of this picture, for I saw it in nine reels, to which it had been cut from the fourteen that were sent over. A story that takes originally fourteen reels to relate can not be cut to nine and do justice to the original tellers. And before we criticize the Russians for making the thing so long we would have to know how it fared in its immediate market, for which it primarily was made. However, as I have said, the story is not important. This picture was made by the Moscow Art Theatre group. It reflects a mentality that will become a potent competitor when it feels it has mastered all the mechanical and technical possibilities of pictures, and passes on to a study of the manner in which the world wants its stories told. Ivan the Terrible is a great example of screen art. I saw it under the most unfavorable circumstances. I sat in a garden on a chilly night and saw it projected, with long intervals between reels, on a sheet hanging on the side of a garage. But despite the fact that I had to rise between reels and wave my arms to keep warm, I was sorry that I did not see the whole fourteen reels instead of nine. That is the sort of picture it is. To start with, it is valuable as an historical document. While I am not aware that thus far in my career I have been handicapped by my unfamiliarity with intimate details of the life of Ivan the Terrible, nevertheless I welcomed the opportunity to learn so easily and so graphically something about the conditions under which Russians lived four or five hundred years ago. There is so much history in the picture that the intimate story is suppressed, and it is not until after the first five reels are run that you begin to take an interest in any of the individuals. There are many characters in the picture, and not one poor performance. We will hear from people who can make such a picture. When I saw it I was the guest of the Russian-American Art Club, an organization of intellectual Russians who are gracious hosts and delightful companions. They have a home on Harold Way, near Western, and foregather there with their friends to keep alive that in them that makes them love an art for something more than what they can get out of it; and also to have a darn good time, another line along which they are talented. Michael Vavitch, that splendid actor, is president of the club, and other accomplished artists whom Russia has sent us are leading spirits in it. Can Anything Good Come Out of Russia? A FEW Spectators ago I said that Hollywood had Russia to fear most as a source of competition. The intelligent and educated Russian is an intellectual force that will leave its impress upon anything with which it comes in contact. As a nation Russia to-day is in a rather chaotic state, but it is not hindering its film-inclined intellectuals from studying motion pictures and putting the result of the studies on the screen. A picture like Ivan the Terrible shows what extraordinary progress On the Value of Doing a Thing in the Right Way A THRILL is provided by the blowing up of a powder house at a gold mine. Some runaway ore cars dash out of a tunnel and bump into the place where the dynamite is kept; the place blows up, jarring enough rock loose to constitute the assessment work that Bebe Daniels and Jimmy Hall must complete that very second or lose the mine. Its all in The Fifty-Fifty Girl, a quite satisfactory comedy. There is something the matter with the explosion sequence. I have said several times in The Spec