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220 SOUND MOTION PICTURES
in the studios. Sound and dialogue pictures have become a prominent and vital force within the industry. Now that the screen has found its voice a new art has been created. For many years news reels have brought distant lands and celebrities close to home audiences. The moving picture improved on the commercial photograph in that action supplemented features as a key to character. Now comes the talking reel, and we not merely see the King of Spain (to select one instance) but hear him speak. We hear him, and, what is more, he speaks to us directly, to the American people. The attractiveness of the man, the message he delivers, have untold possibilities for international accord. No less, they make actual, because of the medium of presentation, a fresh stimulus to interest in the theatre and in the industry. Another instance has even more remarkable elements: Bernard Shaw, with whose spirit we have been in touch through the printed page, but who will not cross the Atlantic, is nevertheless actually audible at last. Fortunate old man! — he has solved a dilemma by surviving it!
Yet when I speak of vistas of possibility, it is not merely of the reporter's function that I am thinking, or even of the bodily carrying over of drama from the traditional theatre to the mechanical. The fact that we can already transplant Fannie Brice from the Follies to the talking screen means only that the new equipment is ready to start where the stage leaves off. It has been all very well, for a transition and for the sake of distributing drama far and wide, to produce sound pictures that are simply faithful recordings of good plays. I am aware of the value and the permanence of this sort of duplication. I am aware likewise of the opportunity the cinema now has to make good an inherent deficiency in the production of great masters like Shakespeare, whose genius is deprived of much when there can be no appeal to the ear. Conscious as I am of all these ex