Hollywood Spectator (1931)

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22 Hollywood Spectator ▼ ▼ A sound picture is made by attempting to employ two distinct mediums as a single entity. The first of these, the camera, is essentially a thing of illusion, carrying with it a spontaneous subconscious acceptance of the illusion on the part of every human being. The second, in the main the human voice, is the acme of all reality, insistent upon that quality in everything around it. Each of these mediums is complete in itself; consequently they overlap and make incongruous demands on every situation to be presented on a screen. How are they to be combined in employment? Certainly not by excluding one of them occasionally at the expense of the other! Certainly not by subduing one in favor of the other, as the camera is now stultified in favor of dialogue! Then what is the answer, Mr. Beaton? Do you know? You will not be permitted by the public to cut the Gordian knot with the knife of silence. Chaplin’s last picture should convince you of that. There is an answer: What you are shrieking for has actually been accomplished — but only in a single sequence. When Lubitsch made a railroad train, a girl, a countryside, and an audience sing a song together, he proved it — and how! Perhaps it wasn’t even a perfect sequence: The close up of Miss MacDonald (the last important and the only stationary material to be exploited) was a bad mistake; the long parallel lines of peasantry in the hay fields (designed to accelerate a sense of the forward rush of the train) was not a successful device, as the severe mathematical formation and lack of perspectives made the audience visually conscious and so failed to produce the desired physical reflex. A resort to the Russian method of progressive quick-cutting might have saved it, however. But these were trivial errors in mere brush work. Behind this sequence lay the first correct conception and exploitation of the sound picture medium. Camera, sound, and the human voice each contributed to their maximum dramatic effectiveness. An enormous achievement!— surpassing even Chaplin’s contribution to the cinema in his direction of A Woman of Paris. So, if you wish a solution to the problem you have set yourself, you need not go Beyond the Blue Horizon. Take what you find there and tell us how to apply it in other directions. Gather all the experts of Hollywood to lecture on sound picture technic, if you must! But gather them under a single hat. It will afford space for all of them, provided the initials on its band are E. L. Reviewed In This Number BRANDED— A Columbia picture. Directed by D. Ross Lederman; story, adaptation and dialogue by Randall Faye; photographed by Benjamin Kline; recording engineer, George Cooper, assistant director, Mack Wright; film editor, Gene Milford. The cast: Buck Jones, Ethel Kenyon, Philo McCullough, Wallace MacDonald, A1 Smith, John Oscar, Clark Burroughs, Fred Burns. FREE SOUL— A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer picture. Directed by Clarence Brown; from the book by Adela Rogers St. Johns; adaptation by Becky Gardiner; dialogue continuity by John Meehan; photographer, William Daniels, recording director, Douglas Shearer; art director, Cedric Gibbons; gowns by Adrian; film editor, Hugh Wynn. The cast: Norma Shearer, Leslie Howard, Lionel Barrymore, Clark Gable, James Gleason, Lucy Beaumont. GIRL HABIT— A Paramount picture. Directed by Edward Cline; based upon a play by A. E. Thomas and Clayton Hamilton; screen play by Owen David and Gertrude Purcell; photographed by Larry Williams. The cast: Charlie Ruggles, Tamara Geva, Sue Conroy, Margaret Dumont, Allen Jenkins, Donald Meek, Douglas Gilmore, Jerome Daley, Betty Garde. MAN IN POSSESSION— A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer picture. Directed by Sam Wood; from the play by H. M. Harwood; screen adaptation by Sarah Y. Mason; additional dialogue by Sarah Y. Mason and P. G. Wodehouse; photographed by Oliver T. Marsh; recording director, Douglas Shearer; art director, Cedric Gibbons; gowns by Adrian; film editor, Ben Lewis. The cast: Robert Montgomery, Charlotte Greenwood, Irene Purcell, C. Aubrey Smith, Beryl Mercer, Reginald Owen, Alan Mowbray, Maude Eburne, Forrester Harvey, Yorke Sherwood. NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET— A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer picture; a Cosmopolitan production. Directed by W. S. Van Dyke; from the story by Peter B. Kyne; dialogue continuity by Edwin Justus Mayer; additional dialogue by Ruth Cummings and John Lynch; Islands of Love by Arthur Freed; photographed by Merritt B. Gerstad; recording director, Douglas Shearer; art director, Cedric Gibbons; wardrobe by Rene Hubert; film editor, Ben Lewis. The cast: Leslie Howard, Conchita Montenegro, C. Aubrey Smith, Karen Morley, Mitchell Lewis, Hale Hamilton, Clyde Cook, Bob Gilbert, Joan Standing, Eulalie Jensen. NIGHT ANGEL— A Paramount picture. Written and directed by Edmund Goulding; photographed by William Steiner. The cast: Nancy Carroll, Fredric March, Phoebe Foster, Alison Skipworth, Alan Hale. PUBLIC DEFENDER— A Radio picture. Directed by J. Walter Ruben; from the novel by George Goodchild; screen version and dialogue by Bernard Schubert; associate producer, Louis Sarecky; art director, Max Ree; assistant director, James Anderson; photographed by Edward Cronjager; film editor, Archie Marshek. The cast: Richard Dix, Shirley Grey, Edmund Breese, Paul Hurst, Purnell Pratt, Alan Roscoe, Boris Karloff, Ruth Weston, Nella Walker, William Halligan, Frank Sheridan, Carl Gerard. SIX CYLINDER LOVE— A Fox picture. Directed by Thornton Freeland; from the play by William Anthony McGuire; adaptation and dialogue by William Conselman and Norman Houston; dialogue director, Norman Houston; chief cameraman, Ernest Palmer; chief recording engineer, Eugene Grossman; assistant director, Sam Wurtzel; settings by Duncan Cramer; costumes by Sophie Wachner. The cast: Spencer Tracy, Edward Everett Horton, Sidney Fox, William Collier, Sr., Una Merkel, Lorin Raker, William Holden, Ruth Warren, Bert Roach. TABU— A Paramount release; a Murnau-Flaherty production; directed by F. W. Murnau; story by F. W. Murnau and R. J. Flaherty; photographed by Floyd Crosby; musical setting by Hugo Riesenfeld; recorded on R. C. A. Photophone. The cast: Matahi, Reri, Hitu, Jean, Jules, King Ah. THREE WHO LOVED— A Radio picture. Directed by George Archainbaud; story by Martin Flavin; adaptation, continuity and dialogue by Beulah Marie Dix; photographed by Nick Musuraca; recording engineer, Clem Portman, art director, Max Ree, assistant director, Tommy Atkins. The cast: Betty Compson, Conrad Nagel, Robert Ames, Robert Emmett O’Connor, Bodil Rosing, Dickie Moore. WILD HORSE— An Allied picture. Directed by Richard Thorpe and Sidney Algier; produced by M. H. Hoffman, Jr.; from a story by Peter B. Kyne; screen play by Jack Natteford ; photographed by Ernest Miller; R. C. A. recording by L. E. Tope; film editor, Mildred Johnston. The cast: Hoot Gibson, Alberta Vaughn, Stepin Fetchit, “Skeeter Bill” Robinson, George Bunny, Edward Peil, Edmund Cobb, Neal Hart, Joe Rickson, Fred Gilman.