Motion Picture News (Oct 1913 - Jan 1914)

By Z€ \ LITTLE help is worth a ton of sympathy. Two months ago my heart began to bleed for Mr. Arthur Hopkins, for I knew by instinct and reasoning that he was backing a forlorn hope. His destruction was about as certain as the ship, the loss of which has led to the erection of a beautiful monument parallel to the axis of the Park Theatre on Columbus Succle, Xew Yark City. Columbus Succle is a morgue, the graveyard of many reputations, good, bad and indifferent. It has a statue of Columbus, the Maine monument, a Cafe Des Enfants. So it's out of the theatrical running on this showing and will never be in it. I was determined to see "Evangeline" and did. Strange though it may read, "Evangeline" is an English classic — not by any means entirely an American one. It finds a place in British school books. The story has been familiar to me since boyhood, and the character of the beautiful girl who lost her lover in a military melee only to find him years afterwards a dying man in a pesthouse is one of the most beautiful of all time. Longfellow immortalized himself with this type of beautiful, patient, suffering womanhood. With Edna Goodrich in the star part, an adequate support, good staging and costumes, "Evangeline" should have been a success in the land of its birth. It never stood a chance of success here in Xew York, because New York, as Madam Simone recently pointed out, does not stand for the imaginative, the intellectual, the thought-provoking in its plays. It wants rapid action, surprise, change, excitement, first, last and all the time. It does not want poetry on the stage; it wants drama of "Within the Law" type, or surprise of the "Seven Leys to Baldpate" kind. "Evangeline" is one of the most weird, haunting producti ons I have ever seen. I have seen some of the most beautiful productions by some of the greatest stage producers of the world. To me the presentation of the poem in dramatic form was almost flawless. As for Miss Goodrich in the part of Evangeline, she approached within measurable distance of my ideal of the character. She was intensely good. There is all the more reason for regretting, therefore, that in the opinion of those who stand for good in the play world this production was spattered with mud by the baser kind of New York critic. Believe me, some of these critics are a pretty bad lot, backed up by pretty bad influences. However, as I surmised and expected, the production is good enough for multiple reel form and I hope that Mr. Hopkins, his associates and Miss Goodrich will take this friendly hint and turn Evangeline into a five-reel motion picture and sell it on the state-right plan. They will make more money that way than they possibly could by attempting to force this poem upon people who don't want it. The motion picture public is not so easily led away from its ideal as the theatrical public. Thank heaven ! * * * * Last week the theatrical men of Xew York held a meeting and wondered why their houses were so often dark, why so many of their plays were failures, and why they could not now get $2.00 a seat with the readiness that they could at one time. Mr. Hopkins supplies the reasons in his failure with "Evangeline." Such a thing is against the "interests" of the New York theatre. It is against the syndicates, it's against the "angels," it's against the "powers that be," in fact, of the Xew York stage. It's against the trust or trusts, the rings and the inner rings : it's against the grafters and the crooks who vitiate and dominate XTew York theatricals. It is not necessary for these men to hold meetings on this subject; they know or ought to know that the public has been frightened away from Xew York theatres. They have been frightened, and are being frightened, into the motion picture theatre, thank goodness. And the motion picture theatre at last is out of the hands of the crook and the grafter. It has defeated the "interests," and all the king's horses and all the king's men (— All never again put the motion picture theatre of this country in a subsidiary position. % * * , * I don't know anything about Mr. Hopkins or his entourage, but I give him this advice on his record : That he get into the picture game as soon as possible. That is if he can make "Evangelines." This is the kind of feature film that we want. We in this country want the classics of the country sympathetically filmed. Why, such a picture as that of "Evangeline," if made now, can be used as a complement to or supplement of school books for centuries. Children, while studying the poem for its English, could have it also illustrated by means of such a picture as this. Mr. Edison, a