Motion Picture Classic (Jul-Dec 1928)

R. H. Louiam T |HE art of the movies? Pah!" If that isn't what Lionel Barrymore said, he said something else of which it IS a tactful paraphrase. He is a Barrymore — one of thg Barrymores, y'know — but he is just acting for the money. His opinion of the movies is fifty degrees below zero. He doesn't believe they are getting more intelligent. He doesn't believe they ever will. He denies that the public wants good stuff. This eldest of the famous Barrymores blames nothing on Hollywood. Hollywood people, he says, are intellectually nothing to write and tell mother about, but it is fashionable there to appear even dumber than one really is. It is the height of bad taste at any Hollywood gathering to talk intelligently, either about the movies or anythmg else. This, Lionel opines, arises from a general sense of frustration in the film colony. Actors, producers and directors alike realize with varymg degrees of vagueness how impossible it is ever to make the movies grow up. If one talks to them about what ought to be done about it, they fall asleep; they haven't the least wish to discuss the matter. Fundamentally they are all interested in nothing but the size of the weekly salary check. And you Qan't blame them, says Lionel. 58 He's In Piaures for the Money Lionel Barrymore is Frankly Uninterested in the Art of the Movies By CEDRIC BELFRAGE Enjoying His Jack IIONEL gets a check with a delightful row of noughts u each week from Metro-Gold wyn-M ay er, and he is perfectly ready to admit that it gives him a lot of satisfaction. In fact, it's about the only thing in Hollywood that does give him satisfaction. He has a lot of highly flavored things to say about other aspects of the place. "This is the age of insincerity," the elder Barrymore boy declares. "The movies had the misfortune to come along in the twentieth century, and because they appeal to the masses there can be no sincerity in them. The public today does not want sincere art and will not accept it. Hollywood is tied hand and foot to the demands for artificiality of the masses all over the world. It has been proved over and over again that whenever something real is offered the public, with the rarest exceptions, its producers lose their money. This does not apply alone to movies — only the novel and the play, which can be profitable through their appeal to a restricted public alone and do not have to depend on the masses, can be allowed nowadays to portray life as it really is. I don't blame the movie fans. I blame the age in which they live — the age of insincerity. "How can a race which prefers just to skim the surface of life have other than artificial tastes in art.? "The large majority of movies, produced under the censor-everything-real regime of the day, are horribly vicious. The censors apparently work on the theory that moral uplift consists in whitewashing the characters at the final clinch, after allowing them any sort of degrading actions in the earlier part. In picture after picture we are edified with the spectacle of the heroine acting in the most atrocious manner for five and a half reels, then we are informed in the last few hundred feet that she is really a good girl at heart all the time. If she is good, then God help us all. What they refuse to see is that there is only one way of making such stories edifying — by making it clear that she is not a good girl. It would be better not to show any evil characters on the screen at all than to whitewash them as they now do." Dehydrating Life " nn\ON'T get me going on the subject of censorship. It 1 J is a horrible tning, forcing all reality out of pictures because it bans everythmg that would have any relation to life as it is. But nothing can be done about this, either. In a thousand years you cannot get censors to see that (Continued on page 87)