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THE ACTUAL
director; a man of deep cinematic mindedness, who struggles in vain against the overpowering and crippling demands of picturesense.
Notwithstanding the plethora of movies of the man, woman, and sin variety, with which one is generally accustomed to couple the label of Hollywood and which constitute the greater part of her output during film history, there are a few naturalistic films that are to be considered apart from the fiction film. They are to be differentiated, also, from the work of the directors who have just been discussed, with the exception of John Ford and James Cruze, who happily combine a sense of this plein air school with their cine-fiction.
In the first place there was the western film, a form of cinema in which America excelled; and secondly, the more recent arrival of the south-sea island picture. The western was perhaps America's nearest approach to real cinema. It was perfectly natural. It was, practically speaking, the Americans being themselves. Distinct from the sexual interplay of the drawing-room movie, the western had its birth in the early days of the one and two reelers, and rose to its zenith towards the end of the post-war period about 1922 or 1923. Since then, it has degenerated into a more sophisticated form, as with The Winning of Barbara Worth and In Old Arizona. It has almost been displaced by the steel-girder and the office eye-shade, the dance frock and the dumb-bell, together with the products of America's dancing youth. There is, it is true, some indication of the revival of the western in the dialogue cinema. Its natural scope for the use of synchronised sound, of horses' hoof-beats and of gun-shots, was the basis of Paramount 's The Virginian, directed by Victor Fleming. The use of American natural landscape and types in this picture was highly creditable, and, despite the limitations imposed by dialogue, I have no hesitation in saying that it was amongst the best (if not the best) pictures to come from Hollywood since the opening of the dialogue period. The Virginian, because of its wonderful open-air atmosphere, lifted Victor Fleming in my estimation out of the rut of second-rate directors, although credit must also be given to J. Roy Hunt for his superb exterior photography.
During their day the westerns were widely successful, for the cowboy spirit and dust of the desert are inborn in the true American of the old school. In its middle period of William S. Hart, the
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