THE MOVIE IMPROVES ITS MORALS
FOR ages the interest of the individual in dramatic episodes in real
life was in direct ratio to his propinquity to the locality in which
these episodes occurred. Until recently, a civil war in China seemed to
be of less significance to the average New Yorker than a Tong outbreak
in Chinatown, just as to his ancestors Aaron Burr’s treasonable schemes
were of greater moment than Napoleon’s efforts at world-dominion. But
the New Yorker has learned, since 1914, that what happens in Peking or
Canton may affect him more vitally than anything which may occur in Mott
or Pell Street. Against his own volition he has become, perforce, a
citizen of the world and is compelled to subscribe to Terence’s dictum,
sensationally delivered to the Romans centuries ago: “_Homo sum, humani
nihil a me alienum puto._”
This change in the mental attitude of the average American toward what
may be called the real perspective of current events, a change that has
had an effect upon the screen as a peripatetic journalist by making it
constantly more cosmopolitan, has not as yet revolutionized its
activities in its earlier and more important rôle as a photoplay
producer. As a medium for drama the screen is only just beginning to
break away from the influences that controlled it when it first set out
on its career as a pioneer in a new art, namely, the silent presentation
of plays and stories. It is still necessary for us who enjoy a photoplay
of real merit to exercise care at the entrance to a movie theatre lest
we be confronted presently by a screen drama unworthy the attention of
intelligent observers. Why this deplorable situation continues to exist
it is worth our while to consider.
There are those among the erudite who assert that the oldest of the arts
is Poetry. Like Lord Byron, mankind “lisped in numbers, for the numbers
came.” Homer and his brother bards, Latin, Teutonic, Norse, twanged
their lyres, harshly or majestically, as the case might be, in
glorification of only two themes, namely, War and Love. And so was it
later on with the troubadours and minnesingers, they harped and sang the
splendors and the mysteries of combat and of passion. Long ago was Man’s
belligerency set to word-music and the martial hero owes to the poets
the false and misleading radiance that throughout the ages has
surrounded his name and deeds. And when they sang of love it was the
love of a Lochinvar for a maiden not of a Lincoln for a people.
The youngest of the arts, like the oldest, has confined itself
practically to war and love. But the screen drama has been more
reprehensible than poetry in that, in its youth, it has chosen to
glorify the kind of warfare that is least worthy of public exploitation,
namely, the eternal conflict that goes on between the lawless and the
law-abiding, between the crook and the constable, between the underworld
and the upper. Realizing that the scenario-writer, like the playwright,
must base a dramatic story upon some kind of clash or combat, our
photoplay producers for nearly a quarter of a century have permitted the
screen to concern itself too often with a crude type of melodrama that
was untrue to life and offensive to good taste, obtaining the clash
essential to its being by the same methods employed by the
dime-novelists of fifty years ago.
And as the screen depicted, in its quest for drama, a type of ignoble,
petty warfare, so did it indulge in a debasing use of the passion of
love in its early efforts to make financial hay while the camera
clicked. The rake and the vampire, the seducer and the siren, the
vicious and their victims deified in the movies official sociological
statistics and gradually led a large percentage of the public toward the
belief, subconscious, perhaps, that the respectable element in our
communities is wholly negligible, that the world is made up almost
entirely of the pursuers and the pursued, with illicit love as the
motive force. The Eighteenth Amendment to our Federal Constitution
informed an amazed generation that we Americans are strongly influenced
by an inherited puritanical strain; but while, as a nation, we were
adopting Prohibition, we were flocking daily by the millions to gaze at
photoplays sufficiently shocking to draw our forefathers protesting from
their graves. Consistency is not a jewel possessed, as has been
repeatedly proved since Cromwellian days, by the Puritan. When, in our
beloved country, he gave up winking at the bar-tender he betook himself
to the movies and winked at the bar-sinister. But his conscience
troubled him, and presently he began to talk to his fellow-Roundheads
about the shortcomings of the screen. The Puritans had triumphed
recently over the saloon. Would it not be possible for them, they asked
each other, to eliminate presently from the movie the debasing features
that have disgraced its youth?
But where does liberty end and license begin? At what point does free
speech change into unlawful utterances? How many, and how drastic,
should be our sumptuary laws? Where lies the golden mean between
ultra-socialistic paternalism and that extreme of individualism for
which the anarchists strive? These queries, all of which exercise a
disquieting influence upon our national life, are of the same class to
which the problem now confronting the producers of photoplays belongs.
That the screen must repent and reform, must see to it that its maturity
is less censurable than its youth, is a proposition accepted by both the
producers and the public. But where shall the scenario-writer draw the
line in his effort to make the second quarter-century of the movie less
reprehensible than its first? It is a question hard to answer, but there
is one illuminating fact that is gradually having its influence upon the
output of the studios, namely, that a clean and decent photoplay is more
likely to become a financial success than one which appeals to the baser
passions of the public.
In this regard, history is but repeating itself. The most successful
American plays, from the box-office standpoint, have been, for several
generations past, those which eschewed the licentious and the immoral.
And, by the same token, it is safe to predict that the movie fans of
this country will continue to prefer Douglas Fairbanks in “Robin Hood”
to Nazimova in Oscar Wilde’s “Salome.” Leaving ethics wholly out of the
discussion, and placing the problem strictly upon a business and
financial basis, there seems to be overwhelming evidence to the effect
that an investment in clean pictures is safer than in soiled.
Of course, the regeneration of the photoplay must be, of necessity, a
slow process. We must look facts and figures in the face and admit at
the outset that the millions of Americans who daily attend movie
theatres are not, on the average, highly intellectual, nor over-prudish
as critics. They pay their money to the box-office to be amused, not
instructed nor uplifted, to get recreation rather than rescue. A stream
cannot rise higher than its source, nor can a picture-play win success
if it soars above the head and heart of the average movie fan. Until
recently, the producers, as a class, underrated the intelligence of that
head and the responsiveness of that heart to the highest that is in
mankind’s complicated make-up. One of them said to me recently that that
cross-section of our American civilization represented by the young men
drafted for the World War had proved, as statistics showed, that the
percentage of illiteracy in this country is so great that a
movie-manager who produced a really high order of photoplays was surely
destined to “go broke.” That his rivals in the screen drama have
successfully controverted his proposition by replacing, to their own
advantage, the old salacious and nonsensical picture plays by screen
dramas of a much higher type he would not acknowledge. His mind is of
that pessimistic kind that despairs of the republic—and of civilization
as a whole—because Tom, Dick and Harry, Fritz, Tony and Ivanovitch for a
whole generation patronized unprotestingly the sort of mixed sentimental
slush and moron-made melodrama which he, and his kind, served out to
them. He failed wholly to realize that, despite the high percentage of
illiteracy in the United States—nay, on account of it—it was his sacred
duty to endeavor to raise the average of intelligence in our country
instead of sending out photoplays that dragged it down to a lower level.
And “the play’s the thing!” as Shakespeare remarked long ago. The screen
idol, like the old matinee idol, has been exploited and advertised and
flattered, foisted upon an easily-misguided public, at the expense of
the drama itself; and more than one short-sighted producer has lived to
regret the day when he hitched his wagon, containing all his worldly
goods, to a movie star instead of trusting his welfare to his
scenario-writers. That there is light in the darkness a close observer
of the present tendencies of the screen, so far as drama is concerned,
must admit, but it will be a long time before photoplay producers as a
class grasp the underlying and immensely illuminating fact, broadly
applicable to both the screen and the stage, that, while Booths and
Barrymores come and go, Shakespeare goes on forever. In the last
analysis, the screen and the stage are media for the telling of dramatic
stories and their well-being, in the long run, depends not upon
shooting-stars but upon planetary playwrights.
In approaching the conclusion of the first half of this series of
articles which has given, inadequately and sketchily, a bird’s-eye view
of the past and present of the movie as a purveyor of amusement, the
writer finds himself turning to other fields of endeavor in which the
screen is pushing forward as a pioneer with the hope in his heart,
amounting to a certainty, that the screen drama in America is upon the
threshold of a great and glorious future. Revolutionary changes in the
photo-drama are being brought about by methods arousing intense
scientific and technical interest. It has seemed best to postpone their
consideration until later on, when we turn from the studios to the
laboratories, from the scenario-writer to the surgeon, from the movie
hero to the captain of industry in our effort to visualize the wide and
growing field that the screen is conquering for its own. And the realm
of movie endeavor into which we are now about to enter is, to my mind,
of greater interest and significance than that which we have been
hitherto investigating. Mankind’s toys do not possess for us the
fundamental importance of our tools and our test-tubes.
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