A hundred million movie-goers must be right... (1938)

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ground. And that means exactly what it says: Order of ability, not order of importance, because dialog, the most inadequate of picture mediums, is just as important as the moving picture when used wisely and for its particular effectiveness. Being relatively inadequate as a visualizer, limited in its ability to picture anything as clearly and distinctly as the camera, dialog is peculiarly fitted to keep an abstraction, an indefinite article, idea or pursuit consistently indefinite, thus giving it much of appeal or non-appeal it would not have if actually pictured. Such an article was the "desire to live/' one of the main pursuits in Holiday. Because treatment of that pursuit in the original screen version is an outstanding example of the efficiency of dialog when used wisely let us review it again. W*\w\ The hero wanted to save part of his life for himself — the young part. He wanted to retire young and work old. He wanted time off from what he was doing and had been doing day in and day out; time to find out who he was and what goes on and what about it. No matter how often one reads that last paragraph, how closely one examines it for something specific in the way of happiness, it isn't there. In short, happiness as contemplated by the hero was in the abstract, the variations of his desire to live as expressed by secondary characters also in the abstract. And because they were, because the desire to live as contemplated by most of us is never very definite, because that desire in Holiday was expressed almost entirely in dialog, the one medium that could enhance its indefiniteness, it became that specific intangible thing called happiness the whole world is reaching for, dreaming of. Dialog alone made the "desire to live" in Holiday everybody's very special desire to live. Nothing the camera could have pictured would have universalized it so effectively, endeared it to the hearts of so many people. It was the camera that gave background and characters furthering the other main pursuit— reverence for riches — most of its appeal. A mansion with apart 168