Hollywood Spectator (1931)

June 20, 1931 15 Names, and Some Vanities By Frank Daugherty While the talk is still hot about the futility of building names in the industry, reverting to some sort of half-Russian theory of the artistic advantage of types, it might be well for the American industry, at least, to consider the case of its two or three greatest names and their meaning for the future of film history. Chaplin’s great picture, City Lights, has deservedly earned him the plaudits of the critics all over the world. His triumphant tour has proclaimed him one of the truly popular men of the century. Yet a recent note in the Motion Picture Daily announces several Baltimore exhibitors as “squawking” about the business the great man’s picture is doing. They even have the temerity to say that he should make talkers instead of silent pictures, and, heresy of heresies — return to the two-reeler for length ! Mary Pickford, wisest of all wise little showmen, stops over in Southampton to explain to a correspondent of the London Evening News that she and Doug are as devotedly fond of one another as ever, then steps into a telephone booth to call Doug, and leaves the door ajar long enough for the reporter to hear the greeting she gives him: “Hullo, darling, how are you?” Then she gives the reporter that earful about burning up all her pictures because they will be old-fashioned when stereoscopic-colored films have their day, with voices that will be natural “instead of the terrible noise we have at the present time.” ▼ V And you want to know what all this portends? Well, if two of the greatest “names” we have developed have to resort to personal tours and an airing of their matrimonial problems to sell their pictures, and the third has to turn down bids to the king’s private tatting parties in order to discourse learnedly on the difference between the king and the clown, the time has come, as that good old walrus of Carroll’s said, to talk about it a little. It is an open secret that Mary Pickford’s pictures have not made the millions once they did. Her consort, between traveling and shying a golf ball across the English downs, has found time recently but for one nondescript effort about which no one talks with any degree of pride — except perhaps Edmund Goulding. The names of this pair have rattled around the world so innumerably many times, have been on the tongues of kings and cabbagemen, nurses and counselors, babes and graybeards so often, that it is possible to conclude that there is probably not a square foot of ground between the poles where they are not known. Yet a bad picture by either one of them will hardly make wages for the prop men. ▼ ▼ The case of Chaplin is a little different. This fellow, there seems no doubt about it, is an artist. Not only so, but he is a great artist. Yet the exquisite fineness of Mr. Chaplin’s conceptions seemed to matter not at all the other day when Mr. Katz or someone of equal prominence refused to take his picture for his circuit of several hundred theatres right here in Mr. Chaplin’s own adopted land. And then there were those Baltimore exhibitors. The art of Chaplin meant not a thing to them. I have sometimes wondered if the motion picture is possible of development as a great art. Great artists arise in the world of books and painting, etc., and their works, perhaps netting them only a few farthings during their lifetime, roll up their principal return in the centuries which follow, during which the thick-witted generations have an opportunity to catch up with the artist’s meanings. But Miss Pickford claims, not without reason, that her pictures will be outmoded in a very few years. And if hers will, may not Chaplin’s also? What if he is the greatest silent pantomimist we ever have known? May we not have a motion picture of the future so sensational in effect and so broad in scope that it will seem a futile and a silly thing to do to haul out those old Chaplin pictures, like ancient papyrus, to have one long last scholarly look at them? ▼ ▼ There are, of course, those of us who do not believe that it will ever be quite that bad. But at least the situation seems to bring one point clearly to the fore. Perhaps two. One, that the more we overload any art with mechanical appurtenances, the less likely is it to withstand the burden of time, which has a rather vigorous way of rusting away what is material and mechanical — leaving the art based on them with not much more than skin and bones to stand in. Two, that if the motion picture’s true development is to be a development of mechanics, it may be, and is, doomed to a very temporal and almost ephemeral history; but doomed or not, it equally may become a very high expression of mechanics. The question then arises as to whom the motion picture best expresses, and the answer of course is the mechanic. Since, then, the director is the true mechanic of the motion picture, even this elongated argument seems to bring us again to the conclusion that the only artist, the only worker in pictures who has even a remote chance of becoming an artist, is the director. What then, becomes of those nice fellows in the latest Eddie Schmidt clothes who wander about studios under the guise of being directors and sneer at the “mechanical nonsense” of the Russians? T ▼ T Is It Theatre? Mr. George Jean Nathan’s latest theatrical propaedeutics in the current issue of Vanity Fair, while glistening with the usual Nathan lustre of word and phrase, descend, in at least one poor reader’s thought, to a level of frippery heretofore untouched by such a sage commentator. Mr. Nathan asks himself, after some general praise of the worthiness but dispraise of the general dullness of Theatre Guild productions, if they are really theatre. Precisely, “It is art, but is it theatre?” Nor am I going to bore you with a long dissertation on a question that was animating the graybeards when I first was learning to whittle a stick out in the Washington