Motion Picture Classic (Jul-Dec 1930)

Gilding By 1 E R B E R T :ruikshank Or, How To Improve The Film-s With A Little More Silence No less an authority than Oscar Wilde has said that a truth ceases to be a truth when it becomes a platitude. Yet there's many a truth hidden in platitude, n fact, it is platitude, rather than love, that makes the vorld go round. Civilization is founded upon it. It echoes Vom high places and reverberates in lowly ones. We all know, for instance, that the pitcher who goes too )ften to the box "blows up" at last — generally with the score tied and three men on base in the ninth. Raided love lests demonstrate the axiom that a fool and his honey are soon parted. Obviously, people who live in glass houses houldn't roll bones. Unless, of course, they've fixed rhings Down Town. This sort of thing could go on until we were all laid end on end and stretched from dead-line to publication date. 3ut you get the general idea. And the point that is about to be made is that Silence is Golden, even in sound pictures. Not that the movies should be seen and not heard. Ah no, not that. True, some of them would confer a boon upon mankind if they weren't heard — or seen, for that matter. But that is neither here nor rare. The vital fact of the matter is that the gold of silence assays higher, now that the screen re-echoes with a silvered sibilance, than ever it did when the movies were still as the voice of conscience. For then there were no contrasts. All cats, so to speak, were grey. And their mewings hushed in celluloid cenotaphs. I hen a title had to tell us "Came the dawn." While now, from the peace of night, we can actually hear it boom as it thunders up from China 'cross the bay. That's what you call contrast. Silent night — sound dawn. Business also is basically sound, they tell us, as stocks thud, bodies fall and banks crash. But think how much more dramatic the picture would be if the nation's poohbahs contributed a little silence instead of telling riddles and funny stories. Speaking of Sound Business THE advent of the talking screen obviated one advantage that the stage had always held over motion pictures. In the theater, one of the most effective bits of stage-craft is the use of silence in stressing a climactic moment. The mere absence of sound can make the silence shriek louder than all the clamor of Babel. Witness, for instance, the use of silence in "Journey's End," both play and picture, when in the most dramatic moment the booming of the guns is for the first time hushed. But when all movie moonshine was stilled, silence was robbed of its theatric value. The best that could be done to gain the effect was to have the orchestral accompaniment to the picture suddenly cease when the big moment arrived. Crude as was this device, movie maestros used it not infrequently. And the mere cessation of the music emphasized the drama enacted on the screen. The next time you see a vaudevillian ride a high bicycle from gallery to stage, swing the spangled blonde over the audience by his teeth, or perform whatever feat marks the climax of his act, watch him signal the orchestra leader for silence. In the circus listen vainly for the blaring band when the tumbler makes his Leap for Life. You'll get an idea of the screen's handicap in being unable to use silence because there was too much /^ of it. i"^-! ^ But the talkies have obviated this. From the first of the big ones, employment of the new asset has been apparent. The tensest scene in "Broadway {Continued on page pp) 51