Hollywood Spectator (1931)

November, 1931 17 is not credited with having written anything else, which makes me suspect that she is the Sigrid of the book and that a ghost writer with considerable literary skill fashioned her information for the pages of the book. We are presented with a servant’s eye-view of the great Garbo, with occasional revelations by John Loder, who from the vantage point of friendship with her, was able to supply some intimate details. The queer thing about it is that I am not at all interested in the personal side of Greta Garbo’s life, but I found myself reading all this back-stairs gossip and deriving entertainment from it. I suppose you would enjoy it too. ▼ T ▼ ▼ The SPECTATOR will have to get itself a sporting editor if the studios are going to turn out many more pictures like The Spirit of Notre Dame. It should be reviewed by a sports writer. It is not a motion picture. It is football from one end to the other, cluttered up here and there with ragged and isolated fragments of what apparently was intended as a story. It is one of the noisiest films I have seen recently. Even in the intimate scenes the characters shout at one another loudly enough to be heard all over the place. But The Spirit of Notre Dame is box-office entertainment. As it will be shown all over the country while the football season is at its height, it is going to make a lot of money for Universal, and as that is why it was made, the fact that I don’t think a great deal of it is of no importance whatever. It could have been made very much better than it is. The fact that the whole Notre Dame football team and the original Four Horsemen appear in the picture will have not little to do with its box-office success. Russell Mack directed. ▼ Y ^ ▼ The TRAINED screen writer who starts with a satisfactory idea for a story and develops it without ever forgetting two things — the camera and the flow of motion — can not fail to produce a scenario from which a box-office picture can be made. The big thought in his mind always must be that the camera is his story-telling medium. If he does not forget that, he will find that in a large measure the flow of motion will take care of itself. Audible dialogue is the greatest check of visual flow that ever has come to pictures. The writer should start with the assumption that all his characters are dumb, and that they gain the power of speech only at rare intervals and only under the most extraordinary circumstances. This will reduce the temptation to become lazy and put in dialogue form a story that with a little thought he could present in action. ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ Once a WEEK Fox shows reviewers one of its pictures in a projection room on its Western Avenue lot. Prior to the showing the reviewers are guests at a dinner served in the Munchers Club. Having been present at a number of these agreeable evening functions, I have come to the conclusion that the most consistent star on the Fox lot is Fuigi Fiserani, who, as catering manager, is responsible for the dinners that are served. The dishes are selected with rare discrimination, cooked excellently and served tastefully. And Fuigi hovers over the tables, smiling urbanely as if each dish were a favorite child. This paragraph does not deal with one of the Spectator’s usual subjects, but it is consistent with my policy of endeavoring to recognize genius wherever I find it. And it is my only way of paying for the dinners. ▼ Y ▼ ▼ I KNOW OF several good stories that are being held from production on account of the inability of producers owning them to find people with box-office names to play the parts. A few years ago Metro cast an unknown girl in the leading part of one of its pictures — The Torrent. I have been reading The Private Life of Greta Garbo, written by Rilla Page Palmborg, and encountered this paragraph: “ The Torrent came to the Capitol theatre in New York without the usual ballyhoo. The Metropolitan critics sat spellbound as they watched this new kind of siren. Next day her name blazed in every newspaper. People crowded the theatre to see her. She met a similar reception wherever the picture was shown. Greta Garbo had become an over-night sensation.” Occasionally it pays to take a chance. Y Y ▼ ▼ By VIRTUE of its being Bill Powell’s first for Warner Brothers, The Road to Singapore rates as an important picture. As a picture, however, it is not important. It bored me excessively in spite of some good acting here and there by Bill and generally excellent direction by A1 Green. The two idiots who wander through scenes and fail so signally to make the audience laugh, add greatly to the prevailing depression. I was delighted with the performance of Doris Kenyon and impressed with the work of the man who played the doctor, and Marian Marsh, who played his sister. There were four of us in our party. The two wives enjoyed the picture. From a box-office standpoint that is more important than the fact that I did not enjoy it. Y Y ▼▼ The SCREEN has very little in common with the stage. They are two entirely different arts. The screen is more nearly akin to music than it is to the stage, and the only influence the stage can have on the screen is harmful. On the other hand, the stage already has benefitted greatly by the influence upon it that the screen has had. In almost all the plays produced during the past few years there were evidences of the efforts made by directors to adapt to their use the technic that the screen has developed, whereas the one thing which more than any other has brought on the present box-office depression among film theatres was the screen’s wholesale imitation of the stage as soon as pictures began to talk. Y Y ▼▼ Why DO WE like to sit on the bank of a stream and watch the water go by? Because it is a perfect motion picture, one that preserves its flow of motion, one that tells a pleasant story to our eyes, that employs only our visual sense while all our other senses are at rest. If the stream talked to us in words we would not sit on its bank and listen to its prattle. A motion picture — a real motion picture — is a stream that flows by us on the screen. Its story is more involved than that of the stream that crosses the meadow, and occasionally it has to say something in words to make its meaning clear, but every time it talks it loses something of its status as a motion picture. Obviously it should talk as little as possible, and then what it says should not disturb its rhythmic flow.