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Motion Pictures and English Literature 31
" 'You're wounded !' 'Nay/ his soldier's pride, Touched to the quick, he said: 'I'm killed, Sire!' and his chief beside, Smiling, the boy fell dead."
Will it really make this strike deeper to see an actor tumble down beside a man dressed like a caricature of Napoleon? I doubt it. On the other hand, I should have liked, when a boy, to see a picture of How They Brought the Good News From Ghent to Air. Indeed, I have always wondered why the commercial companies neglected that, and a thousand other "good bets" that lie open to them in literature. Is it too much to hope that the taste of moving picture audiences may be improved if the educational picture shows that action and impossibility, sentiment and "slop" are not necessarily synonymous ? Let me not be misunderstood, however, to mean that only action that is relatively common place should be chosen. I think that La Belle Dame Sans Merci would make a charming film. Its very simplicity of action makes it suitable; So far, the producer of commercial "movies" has sought either tumult or sentimentality as his motifs. 1 have a suspicion that another generation will see quieter moving pictures, pictures that stimulate imagination instead of replacing it.
Why not make motion pictures of plays take the place of plays entirely in the English class? Well, melodrama may be so treated, for the action can be forecast from movement to movement almost without words. It takes no long speech to unfold the sequence of events that will follow on the heels of the stealthy opening of a window and the appearance of a man who flashes a torch-light triumphantly at the little safe in the corner. And if one can be content to drop overboard as impedimenta all the ideas that accompany the action in a good play, the picture will do as a substitute. But if the play is one of ideas and dialogue, the task is impossible. Show me the man who can make a good silent drama of The School for Scandal! She Stoops to Conquer perhaps, but not the School for Scandal; Henry V, perhaps, but not Hamlet or Macbeth. Henry V is a possible motion picture because it is a Chronicle play ; Hamlet is an impossibility because, though there is plenty of action, there is more cerebration. Macbeth should not be used for a picture because, though the action is sufficient, it would be a dastard's act to take away the poetry. The loss would be too great. Yet Shakespeare would lend himself better to the silent drama than most modern playwrights. The motion picture is not primarily a play, it is a narrative ; and the Elizabethan drama is far more nearly "just a story" than the modern drama, or any play, indeed, written after 1642. Motion pictures of dramas should not, then, be given in their entirety in the class-room. I will discuss at a later point what appears to me a desirable method of using the film in the case of plays.
As for novels, it may be stated flatly that they make poor plays, even on the regular stage. For the screen, even the commercial screen, the older novels are normally too long and too complicated in action. Moreover, the school picture will not be allowed the length of time that is accorded to the commercial film of Jack London's Sea Wolf. It must be briefer by far. We shall not get