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I
To a High-Brow Critic
An Open Letter to Walter Prichard Eaton on Reading a Diatribe Against the Screen By KENNETH MACGOWAN
1 n contrast t o the modern photoplays are these early Biograph screen dramas. Above is Henry Walthall in “Judith of Bethulia” ; right, an early Biograph with Dorothy Bernard ; circle, Bobby Harron in “My Hero”: lower left, Lionel Barrymore; lower right, Wilfred Lucas in “Enoch Arden”
even a past — depends on just what week he happens to choose for his semi-annual moving picture excursion. The “industry,” as its workers dub this most temperamental art, is as flighty as a swallow, as changeable as a suburban time-table, as varied as the thousand tiny pictures from which each screen play is made. In a single week your high-brow may see four films full of good entertainment and even bearing an occasional intimation of artistic immortality. For nine more weeks he may see nothing but the stupid and the commonplace — workaday inepitude. The chances are thus ten to one against the movies’ winning thfe respect and interest of such an intelligent and radical critic of the drama as yourself.
In 1914-15, while Europe left the photoplay business to America, the art bounded forward to what seemed a marvelously perfected new form in the five-reel entertainment. D. W. Griffith and Thomas H. Ince evolved slightly varying types of screen story and screen production which nobody has since bettered in any notable or consistent way. The other picture-makers have merely caught up. They have learnt the method and imitated. Even the pioneers themselves have since done little that positively advances the art. They have experimented with this or that trimming, and developed this or that actor; but screen art at its best has practically stood still for three years.
Now standing still means, even to a fond; frequenter of the silversheet, retrogression' or the appearance of it. You cannot see month after month of film releases, never exceeding a certain level, without being terribly conscious of the lapses, of the normal irregularities and backslidings. The screen puts forth about a dozen new films every week. When not one shows, on the whole, a notable improvement or indicates (Continued on page 86)
SIR — From your long experience as a dramatic critic you are well aware that the great American drama depends on the great American dinner, on the gastronomic pitch to which critics and audiences are tuned before they enter the playhouse. If your acquaintance with the screen has been a tenth as thoro, you would know that the American movie is at the mercy, not of the chef, but of the night watchman. The screen scorns allegiance to Gaston d’Alimentaire and embraces Father Time.
Whether or not a high-brow thinks the screen has a future — or
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