That marvel - the movie : a glance at its reckless past, its promising present, and its significant future (1923)

Record Details:

Title:
That marvel - the movie : a glance at its reckless past, its promising present, and its significant future
Date:
1923
Publisher:
New York : G. P. Putman's Sons
Volume:
That marvel - the movie : a glance at its reckless past, its promising present, and its significant future
Leaf #:
00099
Language:
English
Collection:
Books
Format:
Books
Contributor:
Media History Digital Library
Sponsor:
Media History Digital Library
Coordinator:
Media History Digital Library
Description:
Date Added:
December 21, 2023
Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

THE MOVIE'S APPETITE FOR PLOTS 85 novels do not "screen well." They lack, as a class, the absorbing narrative interest that makes tales like "Monte Cristo," "Les Miserables," "Lorna Doone," "A Tale of Two Cities/' and many other masterpieces of the older generation of romancers, effective on the screen. They seem to be influenced by the fear that Mark Twain was right in his depressing generalization, and that it is better to put forth a novel with little or no plot than to be accused of employing modern methods for telling an ancient tale. From these modern fictionists the screen asks for bread and they give it a stone — sometimes a precious or semi-precious stone, but not what the newest and hungriest of the arts needs for its continued sustenance. This is the more remarkable because of the fact that we are living in an age more stimulating to the imaginative mind than any of its predecessors. We are called upon to rebuild a shattered world, to salvage what was of value in a dethroned civilization and to reconstruct the affairs of mankind upon new bases. It is no figure of speech [remarks President Harding, in his recent message to Congress], to say that we have come to the test of our civilization. The world has been passing — is to-day passing — through a great crisis. The conduct of war itself is not more difficult than the solution of the problems which necessarily follow.