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230 III. COMPOSITION
Vincente Minelli's 1945 film, The Clock: whether or not its boy-meetsgirl story is a theatrical story proper, the cinematic excursions from it made themselves strongly felt as such at the time and gave rise to diametrically opposed opinions. The theatrical-minded Stephen Longstreet, angry at the director's apparently aimless indulgence in New York street life, requested of him that he should in future shoot scripts that have "honesty, density and depth," shoot them with "old standing sets, some lights and shadows, and a dumb cameraman/'32 Not so Louis Kronenberger. More cinematic-minded, he delighted in Minelli's gift for "incident and detail" and his ability to get "something into The Clock that transcends its formula."33
CONCLUSIONS
Insoluble dilemma
The upshot is that Feyder is wrong in contending that everything can be transferred to the screen in a cinematic spirit. His dictum breathes complacency; it is that of a man of all too catholic tastes. The theatrical story stems from formative aspirations which conflict irrevocably with the realistic tendency. Consequently, all attempts to adjust it to the cinema by extending its range into regions where the camera is at home result at best in some compromise of a sort. The extensions required for the adjustment either disintegrate the intrigue— the case of Pygmalion— or are, themselves, rendered ineffective by its indelible suggestions— the case of the Nevsky story themes overgrowing the Battle on the Ice.
In spite of these difficulties there are no end of films which follow the tradition of the film dart. Their undeniable popularity, however, is by no means an indicator of their aesthetic validity. It only proves that a mass medium like the film is bound to yield to the enormous pressures of social and cultural conventions, collective preferences, and ingrained habits of perceiving, all of which combine to favor spectacles which may be highlevel entertainment but have little to do with films. Within this context an argument by Pierre Bost, the well-known French scenarist, deserves mentioning.
Bost collaborated with Jean Aurenche on two scripts differing radically in cinematic quality— the script of Gervaise, an excellent film drawn from Zola's UAssommoir, and that of Rouge et Noir, a Stendhal adaptation which is theater pure and simple. In a conversation with Bost, I was pleasantly surprised at learning that he was against using Stendhal