Photoplay (Jan - Jun 1919)

66 Photoplay Magazine Stars, There is acting, good acting, re and Acting. fleeted upon the silver cloth of our picture theatres, but it is seldom performed by the stars. With few exceptions, the stars play themselves through every scenario. There are of course exceptions, of whom that Mary who needs no further name is perhaps the chief example. While this is to be deplored, the stars are not. wholly to blame. This is a business of • types, and the average photoplay is not a development of character, but the more or less happy adventure of a hero. In the end, a play gets the actors it demands, or it isn't given. Now and again we have a romance, an adventure, whose scenes can only be illuminated by a light of real humanity. Such compositions are the high spots in our photoplay year, and do much toward developing any or all of the latent talents of those who play in them. Infrequently a John Barrymore comes along, and makes a living man out of a mannikin in manuscript, but these ecstasies in the professional playgoer's life are not repeated often enough to harden him against thrills. Some day, when we are making fewer photoplays and better ones, our picture dramatists will recognize the truth that the only creature whose infinite variety time cannot stale nor custom wither is the genuine human being. Then the hero will have to be an actor or get behind the glass eye and rustle the scenery instead of obscuring it. Most of our compositions, today, really compel the comment that "the artistic feature of the tableau is the acting of Mr. Hatton" — or Mr. Roberts, or Mr. Lewis, or whoever the unheroic but lifelike performer may be. •8 The Who revived it? Table-d'hote. Hoover? The hotel men? Chef McAdoo's dining-cars? No. The movies. The table-d'hote is more than food, although, as food, it is more familiar. The standard moving picture show has never been a la carte, and when the high-grade and so-called highpriced houses became the vogue of cities the optical course dinner became as firmly fixed in American habits as the gastronomic course dinner of two generations ago. It is arranged with a view to good digestion and to variety. The succession of moderate quantities of travelogue, news, feature and comedy is directly comparable to the restored succession of soup, fish, roast and dessert, and shares its common sense. An Ill-Wind It is to be hoped that the illBlowout. winds of influenza blew the dust of motion picture ages out of some hundreds of America's photoplayhouses. If they did, we have another example of evil serving the powers of good. There has been a brand of so-called theatres notorious for discomfort and medieval sanitation. Not the high-priced screen resort of the great city, with its marble balconies, rainbow lights and sterilized ventilation like unto a hospital; not the neighborly little gathering place of the small town, spick -painted, span-swept, and as much a personal pride as its owner's wife's kitchen — neither of these offends, but the continuous show in the big community, the second-run house, the cheap theatre of crowded districts, the drop-in grindery just under the lee of the great department store. Many of these places have not been closed, save from midnight to mid-morning, in half a dozen years. A little gilt on the front, a little paint on the screen frame, a fixed chair here and there, and the owner felt that he had done his whole duty to the public health. Boards of health have compelled the absolute renovation of scores of these germ-hatcheries in the past month. Wherever they have left one unpurged by the germicidal finger they have not done their duty. Have you one of these fusty, dusty, musty joints in your town? If you have, its menace deepens the longer it stands. Knock it straight into the washtub — now — while the public conscience is still awake. Make it open its windows, put in a ventilating system for winter as well as summer. Make it plane its grimy floors and paint them. Kick about its menacing old upholstery. Make your theatre safe for democracy and all the other cies. Mr. Griffith and Wandering from the reds of The Ancients. war and the &ays °* con vention into the upper blue of mere speculation, we wonder if David Wark Griffith will ever again give us a play of the ancients? Let us hope so — and admit in the same breath that the probabilities are slight. Mr. Griffith wrought a miracle in his picture of Babylon, the superb keystone of "Intolerance" despite its bewildering overlay of confusing modernity. Those who know Mr. Griffith best are aware that one of his great conceptions was a mighty story of Egypt and the first grandeurs of mankind. Another of his dreams compassed the well-springs of religion. Still another would have visualized the birth of all contemplative thought and philosophy in an India so long gone that even its rock temples are dust. If none of these are ever done by Mr. Griffith the loss to the people will be great, and the loss to the motion picture, as an art, will be greater. For Mr. Griffith, in common with Flaubert, Shakespeare and d'Annunzio, has a gift that appears few times in a century: the faculty of recreating the strife and love and laughter o( a distant day in a manner that might make Syracuse, Sicily, and Syracuse, N. Y., twin and contemporary towns. In the illumination of his hands Attarea. quten of Babylon, is as much our neighbor as any of Maj. Rupert Hughes little heroines.