Hollywood Spectator (February 29, 1936)

Page Four February 29, 1936 She claims their comedy added greatly to the entertainment quality of the picture and that their performances were excellent. I quite agree with her estimate of the quality of the two performances. Miss Fazenda and Herbert are skilled artists and it was the very excellence of their work in Colleen which led me to suggest in my review that some of their scenes should be eliminated in the final cutting. They were so funny they drew attention from the story, to which their comedy added nothing. I do not favor extraneous interpolations in pictures, adhering to the belief that the sole mission of a story is to tell itself without interruptions, no matter how entertaining such interruptions may be on their own account. The Specraror rarely indulges in personal comment, but I feel impelled to state now that Louise Fazenda is not only a grand actress, but is as well a grand woman who for years has done a great deal for many people less fortunate than herself. The spirit behind her benefactions is such that she probably will get mad at me when she reads this reference to them. * * # The screen and the stage do not share the same necessity for meticulous enunciation in the reading of lines. Voice projection is not an element of screen dialogue. The camera moves so close to characters on the screen we can follow intimate. conversations without conscious effort to catch every word. As a matter of fact, in such conversations our ears function to catch only the key words, only those essential to our understanding what is said. We do not really hear the thes, ands and buts. When we are addressed by a man at a considerable distance from us, he must anunciate each word distinctly to convey his meaning to us. When you say to your wife at your side “The key is under the doormat,” she really hears only “key” and “doormat,” but if you shout the message from a distance, you stress each word to make your meaning clear. The stage player must stress each word to carry his meaning to the top gallery, but the screen player is under no such obligation. His hearer is at his side and the microphone attends to the fellow in the top gallery. Thus screen conversations lose their naturalness in the degree they adopt stage diction. Training in stage technique will unmake more screen players than it will make. oe a As long as our motion pictures devote so much footage to the spoken word, they might as well go all the way and occasionally strive to develop some of the beauty of our language. It is seldom a picture gives us a speech worth listening to on its own account and apart from its contribution to the story. It is not so much what Shakespeare says as it is his beautiful way of saying it that has made him the world’s first dramatist. His speech is music. These thoughts came to me as I sat through Rose Marie, the glorious scenery of which could have been matched. by one or two speeches as poetic in content as the scenes are rich in poetic suggestion. And I hope in such future Shakespearean productions as we have on the screen, care will be taken to develop the musical possibilities of the Bard of Avon’s lines. The only fault I could find with A Midsummer Night’s Dream was the effort expended to give conversational expression to the dialogue, technique appropriate to dialogue written as conversations, but inappropriate to the lilting quality of the Shakespearean lines. Whenever we have language in itself entertaining, its entertaining quality should receive first consideration in its delivery. * * * Efforts to bolster attendance at film theatres by sprinkling vaudeville acts through screen programs is not proving successful, according to Don Carle Gillette in Film Daily. It always has been my contention that an audience seeking motion picture entertainment never will be satisfied with anything else. It is sad commentary on Hollywood’s brand of such entertainment that old fashioned vaudeville is resorted to by exhibitors to fill seats which our motion pictures leave empty. The trouble with Hollywood is that it thinks in false entertainment terms, that it is concerned more with its material than with its medium. It runs to star names, biographies, classics, spectacles—anything except the thing that made it great: the ability of the camera to tell a story with a flow of moving pictorial impressions. For the flow of motion which was responsible for the most spectacular industrial success in the history of the world, Hollywood has substituted the spoken word which the stage, in the twentyfive centuries of its existence, did not succeed in making industrially important. It is hard to believe, but there it is! * * * Again we hear rumblings of the advent of anot¥er series of Mr. and Mrs. pictures patterned after those in which Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Drew appeared some years ago, a series which proved to be an outstanding success. I believe the fact that the two leading players really were man and wife was a strong factor in making the pictures so popular. I know it was what created my own interest in them. And since the passing of Sidney Drew, no other man and woman teamed in pictures along the same line have proven successful. I have a feeling that no series will duplicate the Drew success unless it shows us a married couple playing the married couple. I can see only one promising couple on the horizon, Mr. and Mrs. Gene Lockhart. To me they are ideal for the parts, just the right age, both pleasant to look at and each a skilled performer. They have appeared together in many plays as Kathleen and Gene Lockhart—or it may be the other way around—but in a domestic series I believe the box-office appeal would be greater if they were billed as Mr. and Mrs. * % * Fourteen years ago Henry Blanke came to Hollywood as cutter for the pictures Ernst Lubitsch directed for Warner Brothers. He has been with the Warners ever since and last week his value to the organization was recognized by the extension of his contract for a term of years. Henry is a retiring little fellow, but there are not a dozen others in the entire film world who have his comprehensive grasp of the fundamentals of screen entertainment. Current pictures supervised by him and which reflect his ability as a producer, are Ad Midsummer Night's Dream, The Story of Louis Pasteur, The Petrified Forest, all among the great productions now showing. And soon he will give us Anthony Adverse and Green Pastures, as well as The Life of Beethoven and some others now pre paring. His record is an extraordinary one. * * * Don’t overlook reading about the SpEecrator’s Tenth Birthday Party. Page. 2.