In the Editor’s Confidence
From MacLean’s
Magazine, 15 July 1934
Dumbness of the Talkies!
LACEY AMY is a Canadian novelist who,
generally speaking, is content with life. In the summer he dwelleth at Colborne
by the side of the cool waters of Lake Ontario. In the winter he basks in the
warmly advertised sunshine of Florida or Algiers or Italy or Spain or the South
of France. He is a mellow, gentle soul.
Until one subject is mentioned. Then he
breathes fire. That subject is the Talking Picture industry of Hollywood. So
far as the Great Shining Stars are concerned, if you can picture a press agent
gone suddenly into reverse, converting every superlative into a masterpiece of
derogation, you have but a pale image of Lacey Amy. And as for directors!
On page seven we have Mr. Amy’s answer to
our invitation to express his views in print. Our personal opinion is that
there is a great deal of truth in what he says in “The Dumbness of the Talkies.”
You may be inclined to disagree. If you are a rabid movie fan you may be seized
with the urge to heave a slab of pavement at Mr. Amy. We’ll be glad to hear
from you.
(and they did hear from the readers!!!/drf)
Dumb
Talkies
LACEY AMY
INHERENTLY—and financially—I’m a talkie fan.
Factually, I yawn at the talkies and then go home to brood over the pulp value
of my stock certificates.
If you ask me what is wrong with the talkies
I counter with the query: What, beyond the mechanics of photography, is right
with them?
As wearisome film follows film, I count the
cost in time and money of sitting through the puerile efforts of empty-headed
actors to interpret entertainingly and convincingly the dull output of
parochial scenarists put on by stupid or blind producers. Productions of
picture studios that never learn, extravagant organizations that have a camera
for a heart, an emotion chart for their lifeblood, and a close-up for a tongue;
a soulless, brainless machine that in time will destroy itself.
The camera, by this time, does its work
almost automatically. But consider its field.
It was Lillian Gish, I believe, who
introduced the emotion chart, with a switchboard of buttons at the producer’s
elbow to assure a standard expression for every emotion, whether for George
Arliss or for, say, Ruby Keeler. Press button sixteen and you have fear, press
button eleven for joy, eighteen for grief, and so on—a performance of stage
robots but with a less amusing display of intelligence.
And for fear the wires cross, the robot’s
face is blasted across the footlights, screen-wide, like a charge of gunpowder.
They call it, euphoniously, a close-up.
It was close-ups that spelled the doom of
movies. Closeups are impoverishing the lifeblood of talkies. Do producers admit
a histrionic weakness in their expensively publicized stars that requires
interrupting the continuity of the scene to fill the stage with a facial
expression? Must Greta Garbo brood all over the theatre, and Ginger Rogers
swallow the screen in a cavernous and unsightly mouth, and Constance Bennett
sidetrack the play in a futile endeavor to look superior twelve feet square?
What would happen to an actor who, after drawing the curtain, advanced to the
audience to weep on its shirt-front?
Nothing makes me despair of the future of
the talkies so much as the clumsy, inartistic vision of parallel curves of
scarlet lipstick, topped by a pair of flaming nostrils, two staring eyes, and a
broken line of expressionless mascara. What matter that a double row of
preposterous glycerine tears rolls over pits that, on reflection, must be
skin-pores, or that those glaring ovals are the eyes of fear?
It would be useless, I suppose, to ask a producer
which is more important, the scene or the star’s make-up. He’s that kind of a
man.
To continue contributing one’s forty or
sixty cents for feeble entertainment, one must beware of analyzing the essentials
of the average picture. When I see Clark Gable don and doff his coat a dozen
times as a vital feature of a single film, or William Powell flirt his cigar
and his eyes until I reel with dizziness, or Ruth Chatterton light enough
cigarettes to poison her, or Norma Shearer audibly draw a tragic breath and
wheel broken-heartedly away so often that her suffering becomes merely
ludicrous, or Kay Francis weep oily globules on my cravat until I raise my
collar in self-protection, I realize that something radical must alter in the
talkies or my dividends won’t.
Bored
to Somnolence
THE UTTER monotony of recent films bores me
to somnolence. Mae West is so wearisomely Mae West that I know in advance every
sway of her hips and every wisecrack. When I see Greta Garbo’s name before a
theatre and the deepest impression she makes on me is that she seems to succeed
in putting it over some of my friends I know exactly what the producer is going
to do with her and the number of pores in her chin. And it’s as certain as
election slander that Katharine Hepburn will bare her teeth in precisely the
same way for sorrow or for amusement—the one breach in the emotion chart. I
have even reached the point where I can sit through a George Arliss film with
closed eyes and see him wearily repeating himself through “Disraeli” and “Voltaire”
and “Rothschild.”
The monotony extends even to scenes.
“Fashions of 1934,” for instance, is so reminiscent that my wife and I sat
through several scenes convinced that we had seen it before—the dead telephone,
the seized furniture, the incurable crook as the hero.
The casting is often a disaster. Who but a
director would imagine that Norma Shearer, at her age, could play the sweet
sixteen of “Smilin' Through”? Who else would sacrifice Dorothea Wieck in such a
weak story as "Miss Fane’s Baby is Stolen”? But then it appeared in a
national magazine. Why waste what ability and looks Jessie Matthews has on a
trifling medium like “Friday the 13th”? Did it not expose the true Greta Garbo
that she insisted on John Gilbert playing opposite her in “Queen Christina?”
And some of us were unfortunate enough to pay real money to see Mary Pickford
in “The Taming of the Shrew” and in “Secrets.”
How dreary those endless undressing scenes!
Filth condemns itself, though only through the box-office. But it seems that
when a producer suspects flagging grip in a story he inserts a girl or two
parading in her lingerie, until one sees it as stage property. Miss Wieck in
the “Miss Fane” story prepares for a bath that has no bearing on the plot, and
Miss Matthews bares her legs so determinedly and unnecessarily in “Friday the
13th” and in “The Good Companions” that one can only conclude she considers her
figure her fortune.
Too often a feature picture is ruined by
being harnessed to fill-ups that should never have been taken. These so-called
comedies may amuse a child here and there and the odd half-wit, but children
grow up and have to pay full price, and talkies will be dead before they create
enough half-wits to be worth considering as box-office assets. The only excuse
for the average “comedy” is to help the Hollywood unemployed. It would help the
entire country if the films were used as fuel. A totally unemployed Hollywood,
as it is at present, is the one hope for the talkies.
Hollywood Doesn’t Learn
I KNOW good films are possible, for I have
lived in Europe for several years. If the better Russian and German films were
given a chance in America, done as efficiently in English, Hollywood would be a
great “To Let” sign in a month. With judicious cutting, even the better English
films would worry the West Coast producer.
What stars has Hollywood produced in all its
career, with the possible exception of Lon Chaney of the movies and Lionel
Barrymore who is only being standardized by the studios, to compare with Conrad
Veidt or Charles Laughton or Herbert Marshall or Emil Jannings? Place beside
them Jimmy Durante and Eddie Cantor and Lee Tracy and Max Baer and Douglas
Fairbanks and Robert Montgomery, also Ruby Keeler and Constance Bennett and
Joan Blondell and Ginger Rogers and Myrna Loy and Jean Harlow and Clara Bow
and—well, go right through the list. The gift of Veidt and Marshall is their
submergence in the scene, a talent not only anathema to Hollywood stars but
infinitely beyond them.
The moment they begin projecting Marshall to
the circumference of the screen he will strike the slippery slope to oblivion.
Hollywood is not so much a studio as a
disease sucking the lifeblood from an industry that should be profitable and
entertaining.
The reason for all this is as simple as the
remedy. The Hollywood producer possesses no artistic background, instinct or
training, no sense of fineness, no profitable flexibility of judgment, no
submission to reason.
He hires a director whose conception of the
path to success is via pretty girls—and often, pretty men—and a grotesque opinion
of the publicity value of waste. He turns a blind eye to the public grin when
he blathers of cost, and his mind is hermetically sealed against the encircling
proof that little is sealed inside.
That’s the sort of man who selects the story
to be filmed. For these stories he sees only two sources—the professional
scenarist and the widely discussed page. It never endangers his mental
catalepsy.
Has anything more ludicrously exposed the
futility of Hollywood than the scramble for Dickens’s “The Life of our Lord,”
when the story is to be found more completely and reliably told in any hotel
bedroom? But probably Hollywood never heard of the Bible.
The professional scenarist’s job is to
conceal his incapacity by warring against intrusion. Working and reworking old
plots, stealing what he can, he snarls at the professional writer and, failing
now and then to keep him out, rewrites him to unrecognizable form to justify
his position. In the process, it must be admitted nothing is beyond him and the
producer. Between them, they can make heaven more real and attractive on the
screen than the original.
Authors have been imported to Hollywood —to
sit with their feet on a mahogany desk and try to justify in their own minds a
huge salary for their inactivity and their name.
Stars
Thrust on Public
TALKIE STARS are what they are because of
what goes before. They are not made by the public but thrust on them. The
female star is the product of beauty contests or of the producer’s cosmopolitan
and transitory affections. It accounts for their emptiness above the eyes. Once
on the screen, her position, her longevity, in her own eyes and her manager’s,
depends on her flair for publicity. How can one respect a system that is
founded on Jimmy Durante’s nose, Joe Brown’s mouth, Jean Harlow’s platinum
hair, Max Baer’s fists, Joan Crawford's eyes, Mae West’s hips, Richard Dix’s
jaw, Chevalier’s lower lip, Clara Bow’s legs; or Marlene Dietrich’s pants,
Greta Garbo’s pseudo-exclusiveness, Lee Tracy’s crudeness, Bing Crosby’s whine,
John Boles’s prettiness; on a series of scandals and divorces and publicity
agents’ fancies? Fatty Arbuckle and Clara Bow went just too far. Not for
Hollywood, oh, no! but for an unsuspected fastidiousness in the dear gullible
public.
If a census were taken of the educational
attainments of these stars, a one-armed man, I suspect, could count on his
fingers the number who know the significance of “x” or the place of the plural
verb.
In every way the responsibility, in the
final test, is the public’s—including the elaborate official welcome of great
cities with motor-cycle policemen shrieking a path through the streets. Little
wonder the screen star acquires a totally false idea of her importance.
At intervals Hollywood, driven to
experiment, imports a foreign star, its task thereafter being to spoil his art.
And so we have the impossible combination of
the uncouth director, the mechanical producer, the unimaginative scenarist and
the brainless star. Result: yawns and more yawns in half a million theatres.
The remedy, I have said, is simple. Here it
is: Fire the director, the producer, the scenarist, the star, and build from
the bottom. No lengthy investigation there, no selection. Nothing less than a
clean sweep.
Impossible? Can you believe that and recall
what happened the movies? It is because the change was not radical enough then
that we suffer now. Sooner or later the public is going to act. And in that day
it will be as ruthless as the talkie managements are blind. As a shareholder,
I’ll be left holding the bag, but better financial loss with real entertainment
than loss of everything, including self-respect.
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