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THE ACTUAL
learned his knowledge of the cinema in the early serials, a fact which is probably responsible for the open-air direction of this epic. Of his other pictures, all of which are worth notice, will be recalled: The City That Never Sleeps, The Pony Express, Hollywood, The Beggar on Horseback, Merton of the Movies, and The Goose Hangs High. His recent attempt at straight drama in The Great Gabbo was inferior to this earlier work, but some allowance is to be made for the superfluity of song-and-dance stuff, which was obviously added to ensure box-office appeal. It is hoped that Cruze will return to the space and truth of The Covered Wagon. He is a director who essentially needs fresh air. He is misusing his intelligence in the factory.
Of recent years, there have sprung up in Hollywood occasional but admirable attempts to use the natural resources of the American cinema. The western has been partially replaced by the travel film which, although to a large extent experimental and only financed by the big companies if well-known stars are allowed to share the natural beauties, has the most prominent claim for the attention of the American industry to-day. These outstanding examples of the real use of the cinema are to be regarded as distinct from the advances made by Lubitsch, Chaplin, and Stroheim in the pure cine-fiction school. If they are not the direct development of the western, then they are at any rate in relationship to it. They can be connected also with similar movements in Soviet Russia, Germany, and France.
The first American step in this manner was made by Robert Flaherty, who happens to be an Irishman, and was the result of a film financed by Revillon Freres, the Paris furriers, as an advertising venture. Nanook of the North, the Eskimo film, although not entirely sincere in that it purported to be what it was not, marked the starting-point of the American interest picture, without plot or story but simply the continuity of a theme. Actually Nanook, which set up to be a film of the Eskimo in the far north, was made on a latitude level with Edinburgh. The same theory of thematic continuity was found in Flaherty's other film, the beautiful Moana. Each in their own way, Nanook and Moana were supreme examples of the pure visual cinema. In form they were alike, opening with a quiet sequence that established the characters in their normal environment, emphasising only the swing of the bough of a tree or the slope of the snow. With an unwinding thread of continuity
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