Hollywood Spectator (1931)

io Hollywood Spectator in a way that retarded the flow of story interest. Anything, including music, that can contribute to the advancement of the story, has a place on the screen. Specializing ET US IMAGINE something: The business of a New ' * York bank is not satisfactory. Deposits are falling off, the reserve is being reduced and the customers seem discontented. The directors meet and consider what is to be done. One of the wisest of them suggests a remedy. Why not send out to Hollywood for a motion picture producer? Have him come here, look over our books and tell us what we should do to bolster up our business. That’s asking our imaginations to perform a prodigious feat. No bank would dream of doing a thing like that. What do motion picture producers know about running a bank? But every once in a while a New York banker comes out here to tell us how we should make pictures. If we are not qualified to run the banker’s business, why does he regard himself as qualified to run ours? Peculiarly enough, however, the last visiting banker who snooped around Hollywood had at least one good suggestion to make, although I don’t suppose he had the slightest idea how one should go about its adoption. He said that to improve the quality of pictures producers should specialize as New York stage producers do. That is exactly what the screen needs, and it is what it is going to get when unit production, the inevitable next development, comes into its own. Under the present crazy system a writer or director is told to handle a given story. A writer-director combination admirably adapted to the making of mother-love pictures, is liable to be handed a murder-mystery story. When we have unit production each combination will specialize in the kind of pictures it likes, and that will mean a tremendous uplift in the quality of the pictures that we will get. Borzage Again AS TENDER in spots as Seventh Heaven , rich in the human quality that makes the real Borzage picture something more than just a picture, Bad Girl is an achievement that will renew our faith in the art of the screen. It did not provide Frank Borzage with the terrific background that he had in Seventh Heaven , nor are his leading characters as picturesque, as intriguing in themselves, as were the glorious Diane and the joyous Chico; but out of the material provided him in Bad Girl he has fashioned a motion picture that is entitled to a place beside the masterpiece of optimism that brought to us Janet Gaynor and Charlie Farrell. This time we have Sally Ellers and James Dunn. Both of them are new. You know you haven’t seen Jimmy Dunn and you think you have seen Sally Ellers. But you haven’t — not Frank Borzage’s Sally Eilers. The importance of the direction to a screen creation is demonstrated in Bad Girl. No more prosaic material ever was made into a motion picture. A mannequin marries a boy who works in a radio shop. A baby is coming, and each thinks the other doesn’t want it. In the final scene the discovery is made that each of them wanted it all the time. That’s about all there is to the story. The characters are equally prosaic. The girl is just a girl — any girl. She has no outstanding attributes, does nothing unusual and makes no brilliant speeches. The boy is awkward and inarticulate; has something inside him that he can’t express, and is a hopeless failure at saying pretty things that reveal his great love for the girl. ^ ^ But SO INTELLIGENTLY did Edwin Burke prepare the script and so brilliantly did Borzage handle his elements that a really great picture results from the unpromising material. Borzage must have loved his story. He puts into its screening the heart-throb that always distinguishes his best work. There was a lump in my throat nearly all the time I was viewing the picture, and when Jimmy Dunn — I am sure they call him Jimmy — implores the great doctor to take the confinement case, I broke down and cried. Throughout the production there is that ineffable sweetness that Borzage has taught us to expect from him, the masterly human note that he strikes so poignantly. But Bad Girl does not drip sentiment. Not at all. It is a vigorous picture that mixes laughter with its manly tears. It is filled with inspired directorial touches and is rich in production value. Bad Girl is essentially a motion picture. There is dialogue all the way through, but nearly all the story is told by the camera, with the dialogue used chiefly to heighten the illusion of reality. In this respect the scenario is one of the cleverest that have been written for talkies. 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