World Film News and Television Progress (Apr 1936-Mar 1937)

LEADING COUNSEL Tolstoy on the Cinema ALTHOUGH TOLSTOY'S "ANNA KARENINA" is one of the four or five novels that have been made into moNing pictures more often than any others, the sage of Yasnaya Polyana never had to go through the torture that is scenario writing in Hollywood. But Leo Tolstoy had his own troubles with the movies, nevertheless. Ail through the last years of his life, when his writings and philosophy were revered the world over, Tolstoy was bothered by an unceasing flow of visitors, who questioned him on all sorts of things, from literature to vegetarianism. And, on the eve of his eightieth birthday, in August, 1908, the motion picture cameramen flocked into his home for a few historic shots. Said Tolstoy on that occasion to his friend, I. Teneromo, and the \isitors: "You will see that this little clicking contraption with the revolving handle will make a revolution in our life — in the lifeof writers. It is a direct attack on the oldmethod of literary art. We shall have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy screen and to the cold machine. .A. new form of writing will be necessary. I have thought of that and I can feel what is coming. ■'But I rather like it. This swift change of scene, this blending of emotion and experience — it is much better than the heavy, long drawn-out kind of writing to which we are accustomed. It is closer to life. In life, too, changes and transitions flash by before our eyes, and emotions of the soul are like a hutrricane. The cinema has divined the mystery of motion. And that is greatness. "When I was writing 'The Living Corpse,' I tore my hair and chewed my fingers because I could not give enough scenes, enough pictures, because I could not pass rapidly enough from one event to another. The accursed stage was like a halter choking the throat of the dramatist ; and I had to cut the life and swing of the work according to the dimensions and requirements of the stage. I remember when I was told that some clever person had devised a scheme for a revolving stage, on which a number of scenes could be prepared in advance. I rejoiced like a child, and allowed myself to \vrite ten scenes into my play. Even then I was afraid the play would be killed. "But the films! They are wonderful! Drr! and a scene is ready! Drr! and we have another! We have the sea, the coast, the city, the palace — and in the palace there is tragedy (there is always tragedy in palaces, as we see in Shakespeare). "I am seriously thinking of writing a play for the screen. I have a subject for it. It is a terrible and bloody theme. I am not afraid of bloody themes. Take Homer or the Bible, for instance. How many bloodthirsty passages there are in them — murders, wars. And yet these are the sacred books, and they ennoble and uplift the people. It is not the subject itself that is so terrible. It is the propagation of bloodshed, and the justification for it, that is really terrible! Some friends of mine returned from Kursk recently and told me a shocking incident. It is a story for the films. You couldn't write it in fiction or for the stage. But on the screen it would be good. Listen — it may turn out to be a powerful thing." And Leo Tolstoy related the story in detail. He was deeply agitated as he spoke. But he never developed the theme Ln writing. Tolstoy was always Uke that. When he was inspired by a story he had been thinking of, he would become e.xcited by its possibilities. If someone happened to be near by, he would imfold the plot in all its details. Then he would forget all about it. Once the gestation was over and his brain-child bom, Tolstoy would seldom bother to write about it. — David Bernstein, New York Sunday Times An Explosive Formula LOCALE HAS BECOME a prime factor in screen drama: a basic ingredient of the production formula. Once a Greek chorus fotmd it possible to evoke heroic drama on bare platforms, and even the Elizabethan stage permitted draperies to lapse when the scene shifted from palace to hovel, market place to tomb. Not so to-day. There have been pictures based on Mars, action in submarines, hotel lobbies, tenement roofs, sea liners, the lower Nile, street comers, the Amazon jungle, international boundary lines, speakeasies, opera stages, airplanes, railroad trains, laboratories, and even the groves of heaven and the gates of doom. There have been earthquakes at Pompeii and San Francisco. Audiences have seen hUls of Golgotha, shores of Galilee, courts of emperors and halls of kings, international conferences, lynchings right on the home grounds. They have seen football scenes, base-baU crises, ski slopes, circus tents and burlesque stagedoors. And in these places they have witnessed drama, tragedy, comedy, epics, farces, satires and grotesques. The emphasis on locale has given literary persons a dangerous and explosive dramatic formula. Ail they need to do is either to duplicate the newsreel characteristics of a well-known event or catastrophe or to take a group of ordinary abstractions, dress them as players, and let the eS'ects of a novel setting precipitate novel transmutations. The camera can be relied upon to create the illusion of reality in the setting which win reflect a glow of authenticity on the action itself, no matter how Improbable. This sort of motion picture is a descendant on the wrong side of the cover of the Uterary tradition of Jules Veme. It reached its highest form In the collected works of H. G. Wells, and It has been vulgarised In other media m which a whole generation of children Is being nurtured on the super-scientific marvels which a virtuous man is permitted to employ In his grappling with a monstrous evil. The efi'ect has been unfortunate. Dramatic taste has succumbed before an appetite for the eccentric and weird ; the moral and psychological impact of sheer story is sacrificed for the retailing of believe-it-or-not facts. Facts which are so far from the experience of the beholder partake more of the nature of fantasy than of truth. The conclusion m the audience mind must necessarily follow that unusual and important things take place only In unusual and notable circumstances. It was not for this that Chekov laboiu'ed to produce starkest human tragedy from humblest facts. — New York Herald Tribune Holly^vood's Betrayal of America IT IS IRONIC and tragic, too, that we cannot praise Hollywood for its cotu-age without mocking it for its cowardice. Black Legion, is one of the most courageous, forthright and bitter editorials the screen has written. Its indictment of the hooded organisation which terrorized the Midwest in 1935-36 is relentlessly pursued. It shows us brutality, stupidity and hypocrisy masquerading tmder the cloak of patriotism. It takes facts and gives them a fictional veneer without ever concealing their reaUty. It fills us with horror and indignation and shame for what has been done In this land of Uberty, justice and equality. And then we are reminded : Hollywood halted production of // Can't Happen Here because Italy and Germany would have taken offense at its anti-Fascist message ; it destroyed the negative of. The Devil is a Woman because of a Spanish protest about its disrespectful treatment of Spain's Civil Guard ; it omitted all mention of the War of 1812 in Lloyds of London rather than affront our British cousins; it regretfully abandoned plans for a film of Paths of Glory upon learning that France would prefer to have that Incident of the World War forgotten; it shelved The Forty Days of Musa Dagh m Turkey's interest; it — but there's no need to cite more cases. The evidence should be sufficient. It leads inexorably to the conclusion that Hollywood may tread safely upon no one's toes but our own. From Ramona and Sutter's Gold and Robin Hood of El Dorado to Fury and Black Legion there runs a common vein : self-censure. We, as a nation, are assumed to be efficiently broadminded to stand before the screen's mirrored image of ourself and observe, dispassionately or otherwise, that we cheated the Mexicans in California, robbed the Indians In the West, stirred a witch's brew of lynch mobs in the South and Mid-west, spawned craven gangsters in the East, threw our cities to the mercy of political leeches and hatched a corrupt bar, a venal judiciary and a depraved penal system — among other things. It Is a pretty plctiu'e Hollywood has painted for aU the world to see, and we may well be proud of it. That is written In all seriousness, for it should be part of a nation's character, as it is an individual's, to be broad enough to stand the truth, however unpleasant. Hollywood being a practical business man, must play Europe's game, which, at the moment, seems to have been borrowed from the ostrich — aU waving plumes and colour on the surface and Its ugly httle head beneath. We, a hardy breed, wfll continue — the cinema and Mr. Hays willing — to suffer these repeated shocks to oiu' national ego, staggering occasionally under a body blow, recovering if the fUm's conclusion bids us hope that the evil has been remedied, but never — let us pray — driving Hollywood headlong into its economic cowardice by insisting that even the pinfeathers of the American eagle be gilded. — ^Frank S. Nugent, New York Sunday Times 23