Motion Picture Classic (1923, 1924, 1926)

Masters of the Motion Picture (Continued from page 25) food for thought. Furthermore, he never insults the understanding. Here, since we are all grown-ups, a courtesan is a courtesan ; a pander is a pander. We are made to feel the reality of these genre portraits despite their romantic background. The Art of Satire Iubitsch's social satires, such as "The Marriage Circle" and "Kiss Me Again," force themselves even more easily into the category of masterpieces. There is less glitter to dazzle your eyes. The nature of these films is simpler, as the highest art is nearly always the simplest. While dealing with more trivial moods, "Kiss Me Again," for instance, is created out of much characteristic movie "business." There is a sequence running several thousand feet in which the husband and wife, Monte Blue and Marie Prevost, discuss with their lawyer the most sensible method of getting their divorce. The pantomime here is tremendously funny without having any of the dynamic farce of the Harold Lloyd buffoonery. The face, hands, body of Monte Blue suddenly become an instrument that flickers before the camera lens with infinite fantasy. The film offers a brilliant psychological portrait of these frivolous but extremely human characters. Instead of being panoramic like Griffith, who gives you a great sweep of thousands of men and horses over a span of years, Lubitsch is analytical, and prefers to film a few highly concentrated moments which have the imaginative fillup of any highly distilled beverage. It all has the effect sometimes of certain dreams in which events unfold themselves with an unearthly clarity, so that every detail of a room, of a person's speech, is imprinted on your mind. "To see eternity in a grain of sand . . ." said the poet, Blake. And Lubitsch can see and show us eternal truths in a casual gesture, or the oscillations of Mr. Menjou's eyebrows. Lubitsch's great stunt is that he gets all these effects with such simple means, with such reasonable material ; like the framework of the old domestic triangle. He is so intelligent and competent as he moves from one bit of business to another that he makes pantomime, which is too often mere dumb show, have a much greater range of meaning. There is one side of these films that I object to, however; the overtone of cynicism. Granting that sometimes the fate of an empire rests upon the proportions of a naughty woman's nose or hips, I still feel that that is not the whole story. Nine times out of ten the greatest victories are simply won by sweat, gameness, suffering. Technically, Lubitsch touches the deepest tones of his instrument ; emotionally he scratches only the surface of life. James Cruze is a master of motion. His masterpiece, "The Covered Wagon," presented the unique sight of a huge train of prairie-schooners becoming the heroes of a motion picture while the characters emerged only for moments from their roles of cogs in a great machine Stroheim's Grim Shadows ""Those deeply moving experiences which I demand of a great art that almost leaves wounds and scars in the memory, come in fragments of "Greed," Erich von Stroheim's great picture. To see this is like living thru the night of one of those big storms on the Atlantic. There were striking differences in method from Lubitsch. First, there is nearly as much shadow in Stroheim's work as there is light in Lubitsch's. Instead of trying for an effect of lightness, he wants to be ponderous and tragic. McTeague is an uncouth and simple being of the lower classes with a tragic life-story which Stroheim sought to represent, episode after episode. It was not a picture for tenderfeet, for the film in its unflinching realism goes down to the very dregs of life. In my memory the picture divides itself into two parts : the action in the city up to the murder and the flight of McTeague to the desert. The early scenes were infused with an atmosphere of drab horror and piled up incitements to crime. Stroheim used "camera angles" and light to get the most impressive lines and shadows he could. Above all, he wanted to make each set fairly drip with feeling. A master of atmosphere, he composes each scene with the idea of driving home an emotional effect rather than a picture qf action. He focuses his camera from many different angles ; he creeps upon things and surprises them; now he lingers over them and seems to wonder about them. Camera Angles I dont know who first invented these "camera angles." At any rate, Stroheim uses them with telling effect. Finding that you can get startling results by suddenly devoting the whole spread of the screen to a few small things, or even part of one thing, they let it sweep about their material like a huge, superhuman eye, now looking at something from close by, now from below, now from twenty stories above. And these queer "angles," w:hen used with artistry, helped to emphasize some things above others, to fix, in short, certain impressions in your head. It gives the camera an amazing grip on you. In the early scenes of "Greed" there is a shot of the wedding group advancing up the narrow stairway of McTeague's house, seen from the top of the hallway. From the point at which you see them, they all look peculiarly distorted, flattened. There is something uncanny about this effect, and it gives you a nameless fear, which is just one of the meods Stroheim wants to evoke. It was these new and terrible sensations of deep shadows and masses, of heavy tragic movements that I got from "Greed." For cinema compositions that aim at atmosphere, the early scenes of "Greed" have not yet been excelled by American work. There is a group of films which seem to represent a completely different technique and mood from the Lubitsch-Stroheim variety. I mean the advocates of motion. An Advocate of Motion Qne of the classic examples of this type was James Cruze's "The Covered Wagon." It was a unique thing to see a huge train of prairie-schooners become the hero of a motion picture, while the characters emerged only for moments from their minor roles of cogs in a great machine. The drama of the covered wagons from the formation of the train, thru its trials and quarrels, to its final haven at the sea coast was an amazing spectacle, as miraculous as anything we may read in Marco Polo. It is pure movie stuff again at its best. In no other form could you have had such a sensation of space, of the infinite sweep of desolation, which these winding trains traversed. It was only because Cruze really cared for those things that he got so much of the magnificent surging movements of this nomadic horde of cattle and men. The journey of the covered wagons is really the whole storv 01 this film. To us it had also the added significance of picturing the barbarous, pioneer side of America, which, recent as it 'is, is already forgotten. It is well that Cruze commemorated brilliantly another colorful phase of American life: the rise of the movie industry itself. "Hollywood" was really a much better film than most people imagined. It was a satire upon the life of the preposterous world of Holywood that made us realize just how topsyturvy and crazy things were over there. The farcical incidents ii. which the group of innocents who set out to conquer the movie capital are immersed increase in speed and absurdity until it is all perfectly mad. One of the best sequences was the dream scene, in which the hero rows thru the (Continued on page 83) 66