World Film and Television Progress (1937-1938)

WORLD OPINION "Audacious word-builders . . ." It is possible to recognise a characteristic of American idiom, the gift of compressed metaphor, of crystallising in a phrase what was once perhaps an American custom or famous occasion. It is a common error to believe that Americans are fond of weird-sounding words which do not mean very much. Perhaps, at three thousand miles they mean only a sound to us, but they nearly always had in the beginning a very precise meaning. The Americans have very little interest in words merely for their sound ; words like "swank" and "bally" and "blooming" are much more British than American. The American idiom is most recognisable in phrases which embody a formula for some notable incident or chance emotional experience. Even the compounds we have taken from them manage to pack a story into two words : forinstance,"home-spun","cross-purposes","foolproof ", "horse sense", a "come-down". Naturally it was during the dizzy pioneer century, the nineteenth, that the American language came into its own, and then the American was discovering his gifts; a continental geography was showing him what trades and professions were to be typically his own. And there is scarcely a department of nineteenth-century American life which has not given to the language new words and idioms long passed into daily use in England. . . . As the century moved along, American naturally added words in fields in which its people began to show a special aptitude — in engineering and medicine, for example. Perhaps the most moving coinage in American history is the record of the naming of anaesthesia by Wendell Holmes and the young American doctor, W. T. Morton. The entries in the Dictionary of American English give all the emotion that the story needs. The first entry is a letter from Holmes to Morton, who had questioned him about a good word to describe the discovery. Holmes replied (this is 1846):"The state produced should, I think, be called 'anaesthesia' ; the adjective will be 'anaesthetic' ; the means employed will properly be called an 'antiaesthetic agent,' but this admits of question." Not only the word but the practice admitted of question for twenty stormy years, and the next entry notes a meeting of Boston dentists called in 1865 "to make a formal protest against anaesthesia." The fate of the word and the benediction it described was sealed once for all by the grim requirements of the first modern war. The last entry, from Harper's Magazine for September, 1865, the last year of the Civil War, says simply: "Dr. Morton has attended the principal battlefields administering anaesthetics with his own hands . . ." I hese are only a few of the American sources from which wc have received an endless number of idioms. For a century and a half we have taken them in from commerce, letter-writing, books, papers and now at a tremendous rate from the movies ; a favourite and painless way has been to learn an Americanism which took the fancy of one of our writers. Burke was fond of "to advocate"; Dickens, who heard Cockney better than any man, and American probably worse than any man, brought back "loafer." Robert Louis Stevenson returned from California with a favourite word "shyster"; and the new Earl Baldwin once used before a placid House of Commons "best-seller", "back-slider" and "a party dog-fight." It is a wrong interpretation to say that Americans as such have a special gift for word-making. Maybe they have to-day, but the gift is common to all nations at a certain stage of their history. The nineteenth century was to America what the seventeenth century was to England. The seadogs of Britain had the same qualities as the pioneers of the United States who walked 3,000 miles and broke the prairie before the prairie broke them. Life was young and hard and exciting and vivid, and the people who lived it gave these qualities to the language they used. Well, the pioneer history is over. Americans can now span from coast to coast in thirteen hours, the extensive era is a memory, and her intensive history is already underway. He would be a bold scholar who could say that America has reached the limit of her wordcoining, because so long as there are minds to conceive such a mighty audacity as Boulder Dam there will be minds to invent new words as concrete and audacious. . . . — Alistair Cooke, The Listener Imaginative, passionate Theatregoers . . . •^ And so with the theatre in London and New York. Here it is a relatively simple matter to put on a play. All one needs to do is cast it, then call in any scene-designer one may fancy. From his sketches anyone with experience in building and painting stage-scenery can do your job, and see that it is delivered to the theatre. Perhaps the producer will have a few headaches during the process, but as a rule the process of staging a play in London is quite sane, and partakes of the dignity to be found in most businesses. Possibly it is too easy. Never having strained himself emotionally, the producer often discovers his play as well-mannered as himself — and as dramatic as a cold kipper. In New York, logically, the staging of a play is a prelude to a quiet rest in a mad-house. Little wonder that so many Broadway productions have a rough vitality missing in London offerings! Considering the conditions under which plays are staged in New York, it is a miracle that there are any offerings at all. The pace of metropolitan life, the noise, the competition, are enormously greater than in London. Naturally, a play must at least equal the pulse-beat of the city, if it is to appear even normally alive; and when, as in a crime melodrama, the action must be heightened, the pace of the play must be at machine-gun speed to achieve its effect. But these are obvious facts, known to everyone, important as they are. From heartache comes achievement. If there is any quicker way to acquire cardiac trouble than putting on a Broadway show I don't know it. What is the secret of New York's fertility? Year after year Broadway's managers cry that Hollywood finally has destroyed the legitimate theatre. And yet, somehow, every season, new faces appear, fine serious plays and sparkling comedies emerge. Despite palatial new cinemas, the old, dependable theatre-audience returns to the Shubert, and Mansfield and Maxine Elliott playhouses. Night after night Lindy's, Jack Dempsey's, Caruso's, Sardi's and countless other restaurants on side streets off the Great White Way are jammed with people arguing over the merits and shortcomings of the evening's play. Their conversations are as serious as when they discuss world politics. To these people, obviously, the theatre is more than mere amusement. Here, I think, is the truest explanation of New York's theatrical supremacy. To the Briton the theatre, essentially, is an escape. No city offers more delightful comedies or magnificently-staged musicals. High comedy, from the days of the Restoration to the modern times of Coward and Lonsdale, has been the pride of the London stage. Despite Shakespeare and other great writers of tragedy, the typical English play offers an escape from the humdrum business of living. New York, on the other hand, is a violent sort of city — over a million people on Broadway every night; a vast wave of jostling humanity gathered from all parts of the world. London, for all her foreigners, is an English city. New York, despite her big business and skyscrapers, is not truly an American city. Hence its theatre is more international, drawing its stories from the crowded, motley streets, and its methods from everywhere. It is a significant fact that New York's population includes some two and a half million Jews, and that the majority of producers and playgoers are Jewish. The theatre is in their blood, as in that of no other race : to such imaginative, passionate people the average Anglo-Saxon must appear a tame Milquetoast: and strong drama has a special appeal for this audience, as does the experimental method. To sum up, the Londoner goes to the theatre to be amused; the New Yorker, more frequently to learn. Not that we do not have our froth> inconsequentials, and our pseudo-artistic failures, than which there is nothing so painful. But it is true that while London audiences shy away from the serious, New York's take a positive pleasure in witnessing morbidities. Perhaps our tastes arc not as refined, but a larger percentage of our plays undoubtedly do possess the true dimensions of actuality. — George Brandt, The Evening News 18