Hands of Hollywood (1929)

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Hands of Hollywood comparatively unknown stage players merely because of their trained voices. It is interesting to note, in view of Mr. Thalberg's stand, that Greta Garbo's latest picture, "WILD ORCHIDS" (silent), is making a tremendous amount of money and has played Broadway for two splendid weeks. Perhaps the safest thing to predict is that good talking pictures are here to stay but that great silent pictures will always be in demand. The art of silent pictures is pantomime — the most difficult art and the most subtle medium of expression possible to the actor. Some ideas, some emotions, are "too big for words." A gesture of the hand frequently is more eloquent of despair than twenty lines of dialog. Words are vehicles of thought and feeling; they express, yet they restrict. Only a few geniuses have written universal thoughts, words which translated into any language strike the common chords of humanity. Read the translations of several foreign writers, French, Russian, German, and you will find that their words localize their import — the French flavor, the Russian melancholy, the Teu' tonic viewpoint, color and limit the grandeur of ideas, the sweep of emotion. Even American and English authors, writing in the same language, put words on paper only to find that they have become — English style, American style. Pantomime, by its very subtlety, its \ac\ of exactness, is the language of the untellable, the language which is as clear to the Chinese, to the desert Arab, to the South Sea Islander, as it is to the American or to the European. Charlie Chaplin, by his matchless pantomime, has created the prototype of wistful, blundering, helpless humanity. His "funny little man" makes us laugh and cry: Charlie has found and destroyed the line of demarcation between pathos and comedy. "THE KID" today waits to be surpassed — the most poignant, significant picture ever made. Imagine it with dialog? Dialog would have made it just a talking comedy. [108]