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THE ACTUAL
aware of the selling power of her sweetness, is the more interesting personality. The breakaway from the stereotyped part has been difficult for Mary Pickford. She tried, it will be remembered, once before with Lubitsch's Rosita, but the public apparently preferred the Little Annie Roonies to the Spanish singing girl. Nevertheless, it was clear that she could not continue to play the child of fifteen, and Coquette was a perfectly justified appearance. In The Taming of the Shrew she was swept off her feet by the tempestuosity of her husband, which was after all precisely what the story demanded. One hankers inevitably after the Pickford of Human Sparrows and Daddy Long Legs, but the commands of time are to be obeyed. The future of Miss Pickford will be troublesome.
Both Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks are extremely serious about this film business. They realise their severe responsibility. They are both of extreme importance to the cinema. With Chaplin, Stroheim, and, to a lesser extent, Griffith, they are the outstanding figures in the American cinema. It would be wise not to underestimate the value of their work. They have separately and jointly given much that is good to the film. One feels also that they both have much left to give in the future, but it is dubious whether this will be by way of the dialogue film. Rather they will achieve even greater significance, perhaps, by a careful research of their past work and a study of the methods of the continental directors.
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The importation of European talent into the studios of Hollywood has been briefly remarked upon, and it is important to observe the developments of these foreigners in their new surroundings and their indirect influence on the American film. The coming of Ernst Lubitsch into the fold of Hollywood directors marked a definite era in the standard of the movie, and his artistry, together with that of his confreres, left a distinctive Germanic strain in the younger American school. It is to be remembered that despite apparent faults, the love of lavish display and the concession to salacious appeal, the American movies were at that time (1920 to 1923) at least popular throughout the world. They were being produced, moreover, with a high degree of technical accomplishment, and were distinguished for their hard, metallic nature. Germany, on the other hand, had developed a type of film utterly different to the movie, a heavy, slow-moving, darkly lit, studio film, bordering on the one
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