THE MOVIE AND THE LIBRARY
DR. JEKYLL has begun belatedly to make his elevating influence felt in
the movies. Press, pulpit, producers, are backing him in his fight
against Mr. Hyde. But the latter seems to be a psychological cat with
nine lives. The power which he has exercised for evil in the realm of
the photoplay for a quarter of a century he refuses to relinquish
without a fight, and an immediate and complete victory for Dr. Jekyll
only the most optimistic dare to predict.
Look at a list of movie titles recently compiled by a somewhat cynical
observer desirous of proving his proposition that for one photoplay
worthy of approval the screen shows a score whose appeal is only to
either the depraved or the unintelligent: “Only a Shop-girl,” “The Lure
of Broadway,” “More to be Pitied than Scorned,” “The Darling of the
Rich,” “Deserted at the Altar,” “The Woman Gives,” “Thorns and Orange
Blossoms,” “The Curse of Drink,” “How Women Love,” “From Rags to
Riches.” Month after month, year after year, the type of mind that
considers Laura Jean Libbey’s novels admirable dominates too large a
percentage of the output of the movie studios. The dime-novelish taint
that was placed upon the screen at the outset of its career has been
until recently only a shade lighter than it was in the beginning.
An old fight is being waged upon a new battleground. Generation after
generation the so-called “elevation of the stage” has been a project
dear to the hearts of many worthy men and women. The scope of the
age-long engagement between the powers of darkness and the powers of
light to dominate the drama has been vastly enlarged, and while the
adherents of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are still in conflict for
possession of the stage, their multiplied cohorts are also fighting
tooth and nail to put good or evil, God or the Devil, progress or
retrogression, civilization or its opposite, in control of the screen.
In other words, both the stage and the photoplay are outward and visible
signs of an inward and spiritual combat the outcome of which is to
determine the question whether mankind’s future course is to be upward
or downward. For this reason the screen, appealing to a larger clientèle
than is influenced by the stage, and one more in need of the uplift that
may save humanity from a return to barbarism, becomes logically an
object worthy of the most earnest consideration and study by all those
of us who believe that Man does not live by bread alone, that the soul
of the race can be saved if the various media for impressing it are
purged of their evil influences. If it is true that there are sermons in
stones, it follows, as the night the day, that there may lurk within the
dynamics of the screen the possibility of divine revelations. For be it
said right here, the first universal language will be capable ultimately
of a saving grace to the race only if it finds a message to deliver to
humanity that is not of the earth earthy. It’s the man behind the gun
who wins battles. It will be the prophet and seer and poet behind the
screen who may eventually bring about the triumph of mankind over the
powers of darkness. But when? That is the question. If those in control
of the screen to-day should see a group of seers, prophets and poets
invading their stronghold there would be something doing most
detrimental to the dignity of the interlopers. The camera might, in
fact, catch a film, to be subsequently entitled “High-brows Bounced from
a Studio,” that would tickle the eyes of millions of groundlings. In
short, the real power and glory of the screen are still concealed in the
womb of Time. But their advent and their triumph are inevitable.
Otherwise, a polyglot world would be doomed to go eventually to the
dogs—a racial cataclysm too horrible to be contemplated.
Let us look more in detail into the data which furnish reason for the
hope expressed above that the screen may eventually fulfill its loftiest
mission to mankind. What is there in the phenomena at present manifested
in the realm of the movies that justifies our optimism? Suppose we turn
first to D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” recently dubbed by a
noted critic “a celluloid _Peter Pan_ which will never grow old.” Year
after year this early and revolutionary achievement of a far-sighted
producer finds a new and enthusiastic public, opening the eyes, as it
did at the outset, of despondent doubters to the possibilities of the
screen as a dignified and uplifting interpreter of significant crises in
the history of a people. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” was also the
birth of a new era for the screen.
I have taken the liberty above to refer to my early inclination to
become a movie fan, to my disgust and revolt as the screen for years
failed to show regard for its higher possibilities, and to my
comparatively recent renewal of a hope that had been almost destroyed by
the photoplay’s youthful indiscretions—to use a term rather mild and
inadequate. I am sure that I shall speak of an experience that came to a
large number of Americans, who had given up the movies as hopeless, when
I say that “The Birth of a Nation” revived in me the conviction that the
screen has before it a great future, a splendid mission, a message to
deliver to humanity that may atone eventually for its juvenile sins of
omission and commission. For the first time, so far as I was concerned,
this Griffith picture revealed to me a fact, of which I had long been
vaguely conscious, that the screen was not inherently a medium for
pandering to the grossest passions in human nature, for visualizing
merely the social phenomena that years ago gave to the Jack Harkaway
stories and the _Police Gazette_ their vogue. D. W. Griffith had put
into concrete form a conception of the movies as a vehicle of combined
entertainment and enlightenment that had, for the first time, made all
things worth while possible to the screen. In that corner of the Temple
of Fame dedicated to the real benefactors of the latest, and probably
the last, method of telling great stories to a tale-loving race, to the
names of Muybridge, Edison, Eastman and Paul must, in all justice, be
added the name of Griffith. And there are other producers worthy of
mention in this connection. Rex Ingram, who gave us “The Four Horsemen”
and “The Prisoner of Zenda”; William de Mille, whom we have to thank for
“Clarence” and “Grumpy”; Fred Niblo, who screened “The Famous Mrs. Fair”
and “Blood and Sand,” come to mind as among those who have seen, as has
Griffith, the higher possibilities of the movie.
Of course, we have with us always the carper and the skeptic, the
pessimist who argues that one swallow doesn’t make a summer, and that
Will H. Hays, capable of organizing victory for the Republican Party and
of improving our Postal Service, is essaying an impossible task when he
endeavors to widen and make permanent the loftier scope that Griffith
and other praiseworthy producers have given to the screen. But these
atrabilious knockers, short-sighted, narrow-minded, and unimaginative,
have failed to take a bird’s-eye view of the varied influences and
enterprises now in action with the avowed purpose of perpetuating the
impetus given to the better type of photoplay by the permanent success
of “The Birth of a Nation.”
Cannot even the most uncompromising pessimist admit that from those
pioneer days when a crude scenario written by a cub office-boy was
screened, for want of better material at hand, to the present moment
when there is nothing too majestic in the imaginings of
master-fictionists to deter the camera, become a dramatist, from making
use thereof, there has been an upward trend of the movies that is not
merely encouraging but intoxicating? There may be, here and there, of
course, a man of letters, not sufficiently broadened by his wide
reading, who considers the screening of an immortal novel by Dumas,
Dickens, Victor Hugo, or other wonder-worker in narrative literature, a
kind of sacrilege which he will always refuse to countenance. To him the
Robin Hood of song and story is a revered personage upon whom Douglas
Fairbanks has cast of late something of a slight. Let Alfred Noyes write
musical verse about the picturesque bandits of Sherwood Forest, but, in
the name of the Great God of Letters, don’t allow the new art that the
screen has made possible lay profane hands upon a hero whom Literature
adopted long ago!
Little good will it do to their ridiculous cause, of course, for
lettered reactionaries at this late day to attempt to protect the
library from the scenario-writer. The screen has an insatiable maw for
dramatic tales, old and new, and more and more, as time passes, will the
telling of tales in the universal language of the eye become a factor in
race-enlightenment.
Nor is the screen really committing sacrilege in making use of the
literary achievements of master tale-tellers. Since the movies first
began to present photoplays based upon the world’s great novels, there
has been a constantly increasing demand at our circulating libraries for
the works of worth-while authors possessing the narrative gift. The
telephone actually increased the vogue of the telegraph. The wireless is
enlarging the working-field of the telephone. By the same token, the
screen is not narrowing but broadening the realm of letters. The appeal
that it makes to countless millions who have been hitherto indifferent
to, or ignorant of, the outstanding achievements of our great
imaginative writers is a new and potent factor in the intellectual and
spiritual life of the people.
Furthermore, the movie, in its traffic with the best in fiction, is of
service to the man of letters who is sufficiently open-minded to welcome
new contacts with old masterpieces. The screen does not merely bring
great stories down to the masses, it frequently revivifies the
enthusiasm of the aging and jaded book-worm for great stories. Is it
disloyalty to my degree of Doctor of Humane Letters to confess that
within the year my youth has been temporarily renewed for a few hours as
I watched the screen telling me in a new way Dumas’s stories of “The
Three Musketeers” and “The Count of Monte Cristo”? Would I not be a
hopeless literary snob if I refused to admit that I derived pure and
unadulterated joy from the unfolding before my eyes of half-forgotten
tales which had been among the keenest delights of my romance-loving
boyhood? If this be treason, at all events it’s honesty. I have acquired
the habit of late of patronizing the theatre that advertises a
picture-play derived from some novel, old or new, and recounts, by means
of the silent drama, a story worthy of repetition.
While on this phase of my general subject, I find that I can go
conscientiously further than I have above and assert that the screen
may, in certain instances, present an author’s narrative with even
greater impressiveness than his printed book was able to compass. “The
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” was, to the minds of many competent
critics, a much overrated novel. It displayed not only the merits of
Ibañez as a story-teller but also his grave defects. His tale was rather
clumsily developed, and its interest was not cumulative. It is hardly
going too far to say that the author narrowly avoided handicapping his
achievement by an anti-climax.
But the screen presentation of “The Four Horsemen” was absolutely free
from the shortcomings above ascribed to the novel. Not only was it
marvellously effective in its appeal to the eye, but the logical and
dramatic unfolding of the basic story was a striking revelation of the
valuable service that an expert scenario-writer may render, now and
then, to the professional writer of novels. For the many outrages that
fictionists have received at the hands of the film-makers some atonement
is offered at times, and “The Four Horsemen” as a photoplay proves that
the pot may sometimes be unjust in calling the kettle black.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating. The screen may commit—yes,
frequently has committed—mayhem, assault and battery and actual murder
upon the revered form of some great masterpiece of narrative literature;
but you who are well-read, you who love the “old melodious lays that
softly melt the ages through,” and the tales told by the great
romancers, pause before you recklessly indict a new art, groping its way
toward a full realization of its possibilities and powers. By turning
your haughty back upon a photoplay made from some famous novel, you may
conceivably lose an opportunity for drinking again from that Fountain of
Eternal Youth which you, more fortunate than Ponce de Leon, discovered
one day in a library when you were still a boy.
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