World Film and Television Progress (1938)

Just the other day I was walking through the Empire Exhibition. I had done my rather tiresome duty to Engineering and Industry, lifted my hat to the United Kingdom, been a little thrilled by the Victoria Falls, impressed by the Scottish Pavilion and rather impatient in the Palace of Arts. I then went to the Amusement Park which I suppose is the ultimate justification of all exhibitions. Not having the stomach for the major tortures I went for the side shows where I tried to do easy looking impossibilities with hoops and pennies. Turning away after innumerable attempts to win ten shillings I saw a panorama of the most amazing posters. I was not alone in my admiration. In front of me were two small boys. They stood entranced before a poster of a highly coloured corner of some mythical jungle whose every point of vantage displayed a fearsome group of the most savage animals. The look of amazement on the faces of these small boys took me back to the days when I, too, believed that for the sum of threepence I would be transported to the depths of savage Africa. The will to believe dies hard; many times I have paid my money well knowing that the inside of the tent would be vastly different from the gaudy poster and its legend outside .... but still hoping hopelessly. Looking at these two youngsters I could remember a day when the show was as great as the poster. Twenty years ago the milestones of my life were such momentous events as the annual setting out for the seaside, the waterpistol season, the discovery of pea-shooters, kick-the-can, the Rangers-Celtic football match . . . and Hengler's Circus. Once a year for many years I was taken to see this amazing show, a melange of all the traditional elements . . . gladiators, ballerinas, clowns, trapeze artists, horses, elephants, pigeons, cowboys, redskins, fakirs, a band all scarlet and gold and an unbelievably exciting finale known as The Water Scene. The fascinating thing about Hengler's Circus was that the ring could be flooded. This was obviously useful for sea lion acts but that was a detail; it was helpful to water-clowns but that also was a detail. The flooding of the ring stood for something much more important. In the grand finale of cowboys and Indians the ring could become the lake in the canon, it could become the mysterious pool in which innocent victims sank to unplumbed depths never to rise again. It became the pool which lay below the rapids down which, from sixty feet above, descended a stream of whooping redskins. Half way down the rapids, shots from the rifles of cowboys caused the redskins in the canoes to leap in magnificent death throes and be hurled to the depths below. But greatest of all variations on the water theme was The Bursting of the Dam. This invariably happened in the last ten minutes of the circus. Then Hell broke loose as a solid column of water fell from about a hundred feet above into the ring carrying with it papier mache boulders, three-ply log-cabins, birch bark canoes, prancing mustangs, heroic cowboys and painted Indians. No poster artist ever exaggerated that scene of terror or even did it justice. The advertisements were in fact a pale shadow of the reality. The site of Hengler's Circus is now occupied by a cinema. It was perhaps in the nature of things that the Cinema should take possession, not merely of the sites of the circuses, but that they should also take over the fundamentals. The very first films had just the elements I used to find in Hengler's — cowboys and Indians, clowns' slap-stick, action, surprise and suspense. As the circuses and the fairgrounds less and less kept the promise of their barkers, the cinema more and more kept faith with small boys. It is significant that some of the cinema's first stars were its clowns. Pantomime is international, age-old and ageless. Almost invariably the clown steals the show. With Chaplin on the Bill, most actors look like two cents. Comedian Kelly in the stalls of Olympia can outshine the tinsel of the ring. Only the other week, Joe Jackson, far from the top of the Bill at the Palladium put all of the rest in the background. Long after he had gone from the stage we were haunted by his silent gestures. Jackson is a genius. From his first fumbling entrance, when he disentangles himself from the curtain, to his last hilarious adventure on a dilapidated bicycle which he almost accidentally discovers, he is mute and glorious; pathetic, audacious, simple, subtle, panther-like and elephantine, confiding and aloof all by turns. The early films also laid hold on the fundamental appeal of cowboys and Indians, gun-play and chases. One of the first stars was William S. Hart. Hart was everybody's idol. He was the first of a long run of cowboy stars which included Tom Mix, Hoot Gibson, Gary Cooper and Buck Jones. To-day that line continues. Terry Ramsaye, writing in Fame 1938, after describing the Number One Stars says "There is another category of fame which is special to Main Street, a department of screen entertainment which the trade vernacular makes it most convenient to call 'Westerns' ... it seems that out in the great big heart of America there is an audience that finds special satisfaction in drama of more physical excitement, vastly less sophistication than the highly enamelled dramatics of the 'A' and 'Super-A' productions, an escape from the talk-laden intricacies and intimacies of fictional drawing-rooms and out into the big open spaces 'west of Pecos' and 'in the Panamint,' the rootin', tootin', hell-forleather, 'we'll head 'em off at Lone Tree Gulch' kind of fare. "In that world of the drama of the open places, of simple faiths and simple motivations, theirs is an order of fame important and comparable only to itself." By vote of United States Exhibitors the first ten Western stars are Gene Autry, Bill Boyd, Buck Jones, Dick Foran, George O'Brien, Tex Ritter, Bob Steele, Three Mesquiteers, Charles Starrett, Ken Maynard, with Johnny Mack Brown, Tim McCoy, Hoot Gibson, Jack Holt, Harry Carey further down the list. Now these are not votes collected from Boy Scouts but from the hard-headed exhibitors of the United States. It may come as a shock to you, especially when Time printed as it did in May this year : — LAST ROUNDUP In Chicago a month ago Tim McCoy's Real Wild West and Rough Riders of the World were let loose with charging horses, yippiding cowboys, lassos thrown to rope in the general public. In Washington last week McCoy's broncos seemed all too sadly busted. First, F. Stewart Stranahan of Providence, R.I., with a $17,500 claim against the show, threw it into receivership. Then, padding at Stranahan's heels a delegation of McCoy's Sioux Redmen visited Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier, threatened a sitdown strike against Tim McCoy unless he: (1) came through with back pay, (2) furnished more than one clean shirt a week, (3) provided free war paint. Sent back to the show by Collier, the Sioux refused to perform. In a big frontier-drama act where white men were supposed to make Indians bite the dust, for two performances there was not a Sioux Indian to bite. After that, there were no performances at all. Restrained by court order from moving on to Baltimore, the show folded for good in Washington, a martyr to McCoy's belief that the Buffalo Bill tradition still has life in it. No doubt about the last two lines. Most people speak of the cowboys in that vein, as part of the good old days beyond recall, and here is what Time had to say about William S. Hart in February : — BATHOS For many a cinema oldster no memory is quite so thrilling as that of two-gun, square-shooting William S. Hart, limned with his painted pony against a two-reel Western sky. One melancholy day last week 67-year-old Bill Hart stood disconsolate by a deep, wide, newly dug grave on his Southern California ranch. A few neighbours stood with him; Mexican guitars softly slurred La Golondrina. Slowly the ranch hands lowered a gaunt, bay-and-white carcass into the grave, covered it over. It was the end of the trail for 31 -year-old pinto pony Fritz, who shared all Actor Hart's cinema glory, retired with him over a decade ago. In a voice that seemed near breaking, Bill Hart spoke a brief eulogy: "He was the finest, bravest horse that ever lived . . . We understood and loved each other." But Time and some more of us do not get far enough away from the too, too adult audience of the Broadways and West Ends. We forget the Main Streets and the Middletowns and we forget the Main Street streak in most of us. The fact is there are more cowboy stars to-day than ever before. Some, it is true, have capitulated to the march of time. These ones sing — not the real songs of the cowboys but re-vamped, jazzed-up versions. But some of the men of the old tradition stand high in the list of popularity. True, Gene Autry with his music to help him out heads the list, but number two and number three are Bill Boyd and Buck Jones, playing only one instrument — a shooting iron. [Continued on page 169. 167