Hollywood Spectator (Apr-May 1939)

£wh4 Plea for SILENT screen technique in this talkie age has had no more able nor a more consistent defender than Welford Beaton, editor of the Hollywood Spectator. Colleges think enough of Beaton and his writings to subscribe generously to his fearless, critical magazine. Women’s clubs study his writings. Cinema clubs view him as a defender of the celluloid faith and his publication as the cinema koran. I have seen almost eye to eye with him for years. Beaton came through Cleveland several years ago when I first began viewing films and asked me to come to his hotel to see him, and I felt a measure of gratification when he told me that in his years of visiting, touring, lecturing and writing he had never before asked a film reviewer to "come over and talk about the screen" with him. I suspect the film industry sees him as one of its more intellectual crack-pots who must be tolerated, if not loved — and so I don’t know where I stand with it. But Beaton’s prophecies have been so accurately fulfilled that little by little the producers surely must feel that he has a good deal which is worth listening to and worth following. Read It Several Times He sent me his newest contribution to the cinema shelves the other day. It is a booklet of not quite 100 pages, called A Plea and A Play. He has published it himself, in Hollywood. The inscription on the flyleaf reads, "To Ward Marsh, who, I hope, will agree once more with something I have written, Welford Beaton." I have read and read it several times, but even reading it the first time, so closely and completely do I agree "once more” with Beaton, that it seemed quite as if I were reading something I had written, the difference being that Beaton has expressed himself with a clarity and terseness I rarely possess. Less Talk Demanded •I He has boiled into one little essay in his Plea just about all he has written for and against the talkies since sound and dialogue came in. And his plea amounts to a charge that if the screen does not return to silent technique, using no more dialogue than it once used titles, its doom is sealed. No one asks for the completely silent screen, but everyone, most of all a public registering its protest at the box-offices, is demanding less talk, a wider and better use of music, and the spoken word used only when the visual image is incomplete without it. This screen art, contends Beaton, and I most heartily concur with him on all points, is essentially a visual one. The Silent ^Technique On This Page 'THE Cleveland Plaindealer is Ohio's l greatest newspaper , and in journalistic circles is recognized as one which would have a place on any intelligently compiled list of the ten greatest daily papers in the United States. I mention the standing of the Plaindealer to explain the extent of my surprise and gratification when I discovered it had devoted a full column of valuable space in its issue of Sunday. April 9, to a review of my book A Plea and A Play. The review was written by W. Ward Marsh, one of the country’s better screen commentators. With his permission and the Plaindealer' s approval, the full review is reprinted on this page. — W. B. appeal, as it is with music, is straight to the emotions, the movies striking through the eyes and music through the ears, but each reaching the emotions with as little tax as possible on the intellect. Dialogue does tax the mind, the intellect, and pictures told by dialogue rather than by moving images tax, tire and eventually exhaust the mind before the emotions are properly aroused and the spectator who was actually rested after a visit to the movie house in the silent days is not rested today in the talkie theatre. Do Not Meet Requirements <1 No picture today completely fulfills the requirements of silent technique. A picture, and this is my own example, coming closer to silent technique than of the others, would be Stagecoach. One fulfilling all the requirements of a talkie and yet being more flexible than one would anticipate from a stage play would be Pygmalion. Beaton pleads for more music, a judicious use of sound, the dropping of dialogue when the players are too far from the spectator for him normally to hear their voices. He sums it up in one sentence, and that is: "Remedying the evil of too much dialogue is merely a matter of developing intelligent camera technique.” What Story Is About <1 He proved his case by writing in "silent technique” a script which he has called "A Dog Has His Day," a complete story with 1 62 spoken lines against 1,500 to 2,500 in the average film of today. This limitation of the spoken word has in no way cramped his style. There is no literary style in pure cine BY W. WARD MARSH ma, anyway, and here is the simple but emotionally effective story of a vegetable man who befriended an orphan girl. She grew up, was given a Scottie puppy, loved by the rich young hero who was in turn loved by the rich young girl. At the climax when it looked as if the heroine’s benefactor would be crippled for life, she entered her puppy in a dog show where, after good emotional scenes, he ran off with first prize, and was sold for an amount sufficient to pay doctor’s bill and hospital expenses to restore her foster-parent to health — but, as it is in the kind of fiction we like best to read, the story ended happily with her puppy back safely in her arms and the rich young man holding out his to receive both of them. Recommends the Book <1 1 most urgently recommend Mr. Beaton’s little book. It presents in the most concise form I have yet seen twenty difficult lessons in screen writing in one easy lesson. More than that its appeal is for the return to sanity in film making. I hope he "wins” — and the new "blood” coming into the field quite rapidly these days will see to it that he — and you — eventually will win. I can’t give you the price of his new book.* It can’t be very high for it has only a paper cover and is inexpensively gotten up. If you are interested in the future of the movies and in one of the best discussions of the day on films, you may reach the author by writing to him in care of the Hollywood Spectator, 6513 Hollywood Boulevard, Hollywood, Cal. A copy of the Annalist, published about tbe same time as Mr. Beaton’s book, gives about the same picture as Beaton does of the industry, but different reasons are given for the slump which hit the films in the second quarter last year. Beaton holds to the view that talkies talk people from the theatre, and the trade papers are at variance with Beaton. Good pictures in the first runs, weak ones in the small towns, and that "boxoffice poison” squawk which hurt many stars and the industry, too, all served to lower last year’s reports. ★ A radio sports commentator quips that the difference between a wrestling match and a moving picture is that the latter moves. He must have missed some of the talkies we have seen. ★ More than two dozen Hollywood film publications have given up the ghost during the Spectator’s span of life. *Price, One Dollar. APRIL 29, 1939 PAGE THIRTEEN