The Moving Picture Weekly (1916-1917)

-THE MOVING PICTURE WEEKLY Robert H. Davis, MARJORIE HOWARD "I wonder you and your brother did not go straight into the theatrical business," I said. "I did my best," he answered. "I wrote a play that was sized up on the fifty-fifty basis, that is, half of the people who saw it thought it was the finest thing they had ever seen, and the other half thought it was the rottenest. I wept when I wrote it, and the actors wept when they rehearsed it; the public wept when they saw it, and when the producer saw the box office reports, he wept, too." "Why don't you direct pictures?" I asked. "I'd like to," he answered. "But it's a business that requires long experience. I don't think it has reached ' its height as yet. Its possibilities are unlimited. "Picture-makers have not yet realized that the biggest of all appeals is the spiritual, the thing that really arouses and holds the people. Movement, gesture, action have absorbed them; they have forgotten the soul. Some day there will be a revolutionary picture, which will be all close-ups. We shall see what the actor is doing with his thoughts, not with his body. What they have now is calisthenics; it is not art. "The picture play is under the obsession of sex. On the screen the only thing that a woman has which a man has not is physical attraction. He can move and gesticulate, and that is all, except fall down — Charlie Chaplin stuff — I don't mean that. She can do this, but she can also uncover a part of her body. The the audience says, 'Great stuff! When she came from behind that pa'm tree she had hardly a thing on! Bet they had to cut a lot of that picture!' There is so much more in motion pictures than that! "But about our picture. The big thing in that was the glorification of the Spirit of France, the thing that touches every Frenchman's heart when he hears the first strain of the Marseillaise. , We want the Marseillaise to hover over that picture from the first to last. Mr. Sheehan and I figured it out that it was the shade of Napoleon who intervenes as Pierre puts the decoration on the breast of the dead hero. A ghostly hand — that of the Little Corporal — takes the cross and places it on the bier. That was to show that the decoration is not a tangible, but a spiritual thing. But I am not criticising the picture as it is. We said publicly that, in our opinion, the film was better than the book; and it is." It is interesting to know that the book, "We Are French" is immensely popular in England, where it is regarded as a sort of text-book of patriotism. Lots of Tommies have it in the trenches. General Joffre had a special translation made and read aloud to him, and the French poilu can now read it as well as the English Tommy. The story appeared first in the All Story Magazine and was so successful that it was issued in book form. For this edition Sir Gilbert Parker, the celebrated novelist, wrote a preface which he calls "An Appreciation." "Writing a few sentences of preface to this little book of fiction has unusual difficulties for me. I should like to write of it simply as a reader who has had joy of it, yet as a craftsman who ought to know, if he does not know, how these things are done, I cannot help but approach it from the standpoint of the essayist, in spite of myself. . . . After reading it I feel as if I had been sojourning in a wild orchard where small sweet fruit grow, plentiful and ruddy and good. I feel I, ought to Robert H. Davis. Who wrote, with Mr. Sheehan, "We Are French," from which "The Bugler of Algiers" was filmed. damn this book for certain things in it, but its naive artistry, its reckless romance, bred in an intoxication of the spirit, compels me to say that I had a good time in reading it. Extravagant it is, but something in it makes it really true. It is truthfulness of the characters which survives impossibilities — impossibilities even for France, where odd things do happen and odd people do live, because the race is original. Also there is a note of patriotism in it which sings on every page. Perhaps it is that which creates a response in the mind of the reader, at any rate in this reader's mind. But touching and eloquent and full of national spirit this little book is, and I am glad to have read it. GILBERT PARKER." The Bluebird officials are hoping that Sir Gilbert may see the story he praises so highly in picture form, and that they may hear, if he does so, whether the picture surpasses the book in his opinion as it does in the opinion of Mr. Davis and Mr. Sheehan, the authors.