Screenland (Sept 1922–Feb 1923)

FOOT AJSS of weakness — it is a sign X tell a love story. Have v^_, you will recognize the admonition. Carr Everett W y n n The point I am trying to make is that, in moments of high tragedy, people do not do big things. They couldn't raise their hands and arms with the usual movie gesture if they tried. There is something smothering about tragedy. Your voice is choked and your actions are choked, too. You do strange and usually very precise little things. Just so, five-foot kisses, slobbering around, are not indicative of love. The good people in screen stories always wander through the scenes with a peculiar, slow glide as though they are too holy to actually touch the ground, but slide around on etheral foundations. They never are human. As a matter of solemn tacit agreement, on the part of directors, all the historical characters, like G. Washington, Napoleon and Lincoln always preserve a curious sort of solemn stateliness that in real life is characteristic of morons. As a matter of fact, Lincoln was given to making jokes and often rather off-color ones. Napoleon had a mild mania for acting in amateur theatricals and for affairs with ladies, while Washington could never have passed the censors. The motion pictures show life in a kind of solemn ready-to-wear form, in vague meaningless phrases. One of the finest feats of journalism ever printed was Richard Harding Davis' account of the coronation of the Tsar of Russia. While other eminent writers were clawing the covers off the dictionaries trying to find ponderous words to describe their feelings, Mr. Davis was telling in simple language how the baby Grown Prince of Siam was sitting on the floor with another baby Prince, trying to tear each other's shiny medals off ; and how the Queen of Greece got stage fright when she congratulated the newly crowned pair and glared at them like Lady Macbeth trying to outstare the ghost. It is just such little touches of humanity and reality that the movies miss and hence fail to be human and interesting. V^HEN Thackeray was writing The Virginians, he asked an American visitor to tell him about George Washington. The visitor opened up with the patriotic wheeze about the illustrious George. "Oh, I don't care for that," said Thackeray, "I want to know if he was a fussy old gentleman who spilled snuff on his vest." And that's what we want to know when we go to a movie. There are no real Pollyannas and no sainted mothers. There are little girls who are selfish and thoughtless most of the time, but who have their occasional moments; there are mothers who get red in the face and tired and get cross and get over it and are, on the whole, wonderful institutions; there are lip contacts which are edifying to the participants but usually disgusting to the spectator in real life. Even on the screen I fail to see anything pleasing in faces glued together. One of the wisest and shrewdest little girls ever on the screen is Mary Pickford. You will notice that she never allows a lover to be seen pawing her over on the screen. All her kisses are by inference. Mary has put on some of the worst snifflers of all the screen stories that have afflicted us. Mary must forever stand convicted of Pollyanna and Little Lord Fauntleroy who was an insufferable little prig and snob; but we can always remember through the weepy mist of her glad girl stories that she always showed good taste in kissing: that's something. And so now, at last, we are getting around to the fivefoot kisses. No doubt you will already have seen the point I am leading up to. The point is, that a fivefoot kiss is a confession of weakness on the part of any director. The director who yanks in a five-foot kiss is like an old tenor who relies upon the friendly orchestra to make an infernal racket when he gets to the high notes he can no longer reach without cracking. The fivefoot kiss is a sign that the director cannot tell a love story. It is a sign he is slipping in his story and is beginning to gesture wildly and frantically. ThAT is something that is yet to be done on the screen — a real love story. Griffith has sent numerous young gentlemen, with glowing eyes and flowing ties, wandering around in Byronic gardens of love: there have been innumerable little googly stories about little immature flapper girls who rewarded their little beaux with a smack on the lips after five reels of tedium ; but there never has been a real love story told on the screen. Lacking the delicacy, the imagination and the dramatic force to tell a real love story, the directors erect a five-foot kiss like a smoke screen and try to make you believe they have told you a love story. 45