World Film and Television Progress (1937-1938)

What can be said of an infant still perversely sprawling in the cradle it has long since outgrown? The cinema has not chosen its own way of life, like the ultra-modern child at the ultra-modern school. Oh dear, no. It has suffered the most rigorous discipline, the sternest of all restrictions — commercialisation. No child has covered so much ground and progressed so little. In its forty years it has created and discarded a score of fashions but has left us no traditions. Yet the prodigy is so promising we are at a loss which school to put it to! A difficult child, born dumb, it suddenly acquired the gift of speech after thirty years. When we consider it, this amazing creature has got away with a good deal. Do you realise that quite a good proportion of the early antics were not photographed at all, simply because the cameras could not record them? A merciful thing in some ways, though an alarming idea for the actor to swallow, and rather a shock for the public, too ; they were not getting anything like one hundred per cent of the performance they were paying to see. For years it gave us nothing more or less than conventionalised grimaces based on an alleged emotion which it would be insincere to describe by any other name than "Lurve," and the old stock-in-trade of Melodrama (still its strongest card). Direction was often so inexact that when the hero was supposed to be saying, "Darling, I love you," in actuality he was probably murmuring, "I think you're lousy." By degrees the film-makers rediscovered cruelty, and the public licked its chops over voluptuousness. Then Grief stepped in in the form of Glycerine. I have no statistics, but it would take the needs of a world war to compete with the quantity that coursed its milky way from the stars. Bill Hart alone — dear William S. — must have kept one factory going. Comedy in Mime Then Laughter, holding both its sides, and painfully grimacing under the onslaught of property cream puffs, suddenly held its breath to see a pair of big splayed boots, trousers, a bowler hat and a cane syncopate their impudent and irresistible way while the world discovered Comedy in Mime. Charles Chaplin, the first great artist of the silent screen and the only one to keep its peace, was bred on the English music-hall stage. He is still far and away the greatest of all screen actors and the only legitimate reason for ever permitting the cinema to subsidise the theatre — as a thank-offering. Then suddenly someone thought of Thought, and everyone was stumped. Nobody had thought of thinking in those days. They had simply Gone After Things in a Big Way. Sometimes, alas, they had Got what they had Gone After. What in hell did Thought look like? And everyone wore a puzzled frown. So Thought, in the form of a puzzled frown, made its bow on the screen. For years and years film actors frowned and puckered their brows and looked slightly constipated and you just knew they were thinking. Face-pulling gradually gave place to something even more dangerous — the Art of Facial Expression. A popular post-war encyclopedia had a page of photographs illustrating this. Love, Hate, Fear, Doubt, Grief, and so on. It was a good example of its own futility; you cannot label these emotions any more than you can learn them by imitation. Once the titles were covered up the fun began! At a guess, Doubt looked perilously like Love; Grief— just acute disappointment ; Fear merely surprise, and I should be accused of extreme vulgarity were I to tell you what Hate looked like. That is why few of the old silent pictures can stand the test to-day; we find them unconvincing and often extremely funny. A face helps There is no such thing as Facial Expression, but there is such a thing as an expressive face. An expressive face helps to convey by natural means the messages of the artist's heart and mind; helps — but it cannot tell the whole story. Witness the celebrated wooden-faced comedian who, for some lamentable and apparently unaccountable reason, seldom makes pictures nowadays. Until he arrived, who would have believed that anyone could have achieved screen fame by the deliberate avoidance of facial expression? It is the eyes and the voice that matter most. "Facial" expression is only skin deep ; it is superficial and therefore insincere. Your bad actor (invariably a lazy one) visualises surprise, for example, in terms of lifted eyebrows, quivering nostrils, parted lips and popping eyes . . . Just as face-pulling twisted the silents, voice-pulling distorted the talkies — though not for long, for the very good reason that having been forced into the paths of sincerity nothing but sincerity of voice would match. Thus, by the time mechanical improvements had eliminated the tin fog-horn, the allscreeching, all-crooning, all-canoodling voice had disappeared . . . How much further have we travelled since those days? Not so very far, really. It is true we have anchored the camera and put a faster and more delicate motor inside it and more sensitive film in the spools, and we have given the cameraman a host of novelties to play with and more suitable backgrounds to light ; but fundamentally the cinema has given us nothing more than the longshot, the medium shot and the close-up, plus the variations, that a mobile camera can play. The technical advances of the cinema simply pay tribute to the age-old leadership of craftsmen in every art. It is always the craftsmen who achieve things. Only the competitive stresses of a great industry could have produced such giant technical strides. The craftsmanship of the chemical laboratory and the camera factory is no whit less highly skilled than the craftsmanship of the medieval wood-carver. The technique of the gear cutter and lens-maker puts the technique of the average actor to shame. I believe it was Sir Nigel Playfair who once said that if the theatre gave him an occasional success and an occasional cigar, what more could one expect or deserve? Must we belittle the cinema because its craftsmen can sometimes afford champagne as well? We do not really begin to progress until we have the courage to admit and define our limitations; it is futile to pretend they do not exist. The film did not begin to realise its own possibilities until it began to forget them. Then it started throwing away its backgrounds, its crowds, its gorgeous palaces. Something more important had arrived — the scenario, or film story. Ever since that discovery we have simply been trying to tell the story better. Because the film apparently succeeded in doing the things that the stage only pretended to do, it tried to dispense with the arts of pretence altogether. Now it knows better. More and more it is finding its own level in the studio. There, the imitation can be photographed to look more convincing than the real — a paradox discovered by the theatre ages ago. Its great failing is its dangerous plasticity; it lends itself so readily to interfering fingers. The Thirty-Nine Steps.""