The Drama's Speaking Likeness

How Much Shall the Talking Movies Talk, and Whither Will Conversation Lead the Cinema?

DEEMS TAYLOR

THE signs outside read: INTERFERENCE—A PARAMOUNT ALL-TALKING PICTURE; but the actual performance suggested an all-star benefit. For there was a prologue that began with Daniel Frohman and ended with Eddie Cantor (''By arrangement with Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr."). Mr. Frohman—or rather his eight-foot cinematographic counterfeit—came out from an ambush of curtains and potted palms and delivered a phonographic address upon the wonders of the talking movies. A very good speech it was, too, his voice coming to the audience with the curious effect of being screened through bolting cloth that is common to all sound reproducing devices. The synchronization was perfect, the sounds he emitted being always appropriate to the formation and movement of his lips.

Only once did he appear to disadvantage, what time the machine raced temporarily, causing him to say, '"AND I SAID 10 MYS ELF.'Tl)isisoneofthegrcatei>ochniukingin vent ionsofthcage\"the giant baritone suddenly degenerating to a frenzied shrill gabble that set the audience to giggling. But his smiling and utter unconsciousness that anything was wrong soon awed them into attentive silence. There were other brief offerings—cardiac ballads dealing with yesterday and faded roses, and a mercifully one-act playlet—and then Mr. Cantor. The secret of Mr. Cantor's success lies probably in the very fact that I recall him with pleasure and gratitude without remembering one word of what he said or a note of what he sang.

The feature film, when eventually it arrived, was good; a well acted and sufficiently plausible afternoon's diversion, adapted from a stage play with approximate fidelity to the original, and possessing, therefore, structure, climax, and character drawing to a degree unusual in the movies. The technical limitations of the talking picture had been skillfully met; it was discoverable, but by no means obvious, that the sets were all studio sets, that characters in the distance or middle distance were always silent, and that conversation was confined to two, or at the most three, people at one time.

THE fact that the heroic-size, black and white, two-dimensional figures were uttering human speech seemed by no means incongruous. The prologue had seen to that. Fifteen minutes seems sufficient time in which to accustom the human mind to almost any conceivable convention, provided it be a consistent one. The spectator found himself listening to the actors as if they had been there in the flesh, admiring the fine voices and excellent diction of Messrs. William Powell and Clive Brook, the consistency of Miss Evelyn Brent's villainess, and the charming but faintly amateurish palpitations of Miss Doris Kenyon's heroine. It was much more like a play than a motion picture—all talk and action, and no music, save at the very end, when a postlude by a canned orchestra served to usher the audience out.

Less than three years ago the Warner Brothers launched the Vitaphone, thus signalizing the entry into the commercial field of a device that had hitherto been but a laboratory curiosity. Today there are new, strangely worded signs all up and down Times Square, all up and down America, in fact, in front of every motion picture house of any pretentions: HEAR THEM TALK—COLLEEN MOORE WITH SOUND EFFECTS—AN ALL-TALKING PICTURE—COME IN AND HEAR THE SOUND PICTURES—A MOVIETONE MARVEL—THE VIKING WITH LOWELL SHERMAN ALL-TALKING. The big, solidly established producing corporations, which had just settled down to a permanent and immensely profitable routine of mass production, turning out their various stock models with a precision and dispatch rivalled only by the automobile plants, have awakened to find that the movies are back in their infancy; that those who make them must build new studios, buy new stories, hire new actors, engage new staffs, invent a new technique, please a new public—must, in short, revise every conviction they ever had regarding the administration of one of the largest industries in the world.

IT is revealing no great secret to announce that the motion picture magnates are going more or less mad. Now that they have them, they don't want the damned talkies. But they've got to have them, for their rivals have them, and their public insists upon them. So, violently against their will, they must play the role of pioneer, groping their way through a virgin wilderness toward an unpredictable goal, sinking their capital in costly experimental plants to produce talking pictures whose gross receipts, fantastic as they are, still leave their makers millions of dollars on the wrong side of the ledger.

Their present output falls into three main classes. First of all are the "shorts"—one and two-reel exhibits exploiting famous personages (such as George Bernard Shaw's famous and embarrassingly fatuous monologue), vaudeville acts, acted anecdotes, and miscellaneous jazz bands and vocalists. Second come the all-talking pictures, such as Interference. Last of all and more prevalent, are what they term "talking pictures" (as distinguished from "all-talking"). Of this class Alias Jimmy Valentine is a good example. For five-sixths of its length it is an ordinary silent motion picture, accompanied by a canned score into which have been injected such shouts and murmurs, automobile honks, locomotive snorts, and other noises as the director has considered appropriate. In the climactic scenes, beginning with the visit of the detective and culminating in the opening of the safe, the hitherto silent protagonists suddenly begin to talk, and continue to do so until the end of the film.

It is a trifle early, perhaps, to begin predicting the future of an art that is barely three years old—a future that is the subject of the frantic guesses of those whose financial lives are dependent upon the accuracy of their judgment. However, this is just the time when one man's guess is as good as another's. So here, then, are the speculations of a rank outsider:

First of all, notice that the partly-talking picture and the all-talking picture, while seemingly the same thing in different stages of completeness, are two entirely different things. In the all-talking picture the microphone must be used from beginning to end, in order to record the speech of the actors. Now a microphone is an object not at all like the human ear. In the first place, while it is keener than the ear in picking up sounds nearby, its range is more limited. Roughly speaking, it transmits sounds either at full intensity or not at all. This means that actors in the middle distance or in the background must be silent. A microphone near the camera would not pick up their voices, and one near the voices would convey their words much too loudly to be convincing.

Moreover, the microphone exercises none of the unconscious selectivity of the ear. A human being, carrying on a conversation in a city room, hears a thousand extraneous noises—street-cars, taxicabs, whistles, distant voices—that his ear simply ignores. Not so the "mike". The fact that a noise-producing object is out of range of the camera lens does not mean that it is inaudible to the microphone. All-talking pictures, therefore, must be made in sound-proof studios, where every sound that is not wanted may be excluded. Exteriors, long-shots, and scenes employing crowds, are therefore virtually out of the question, so that the all-talking picture is confined to comparatively few characters, working mostly in indoor scenes.

BUT the big shortcoming of the all-talking picture is the absence of music, due to the necessity of recording speech throughout the action. No one who has never seen a private showing of a feature film can possibly realize the important part that music plays in the success of the average picture. Not only does it help the spectator to concentrate his attention, by furnishing employment for his ear as well as for his eye, but it adds an emotional drive that often makes the most implausible action momentarily convincing. By a droll paradox, the present-day movie—the lowest form of intellectual entertainment yet devised—is usually accompanied by a score that is an anthology of the wmrld's masterpieces of music. One watches John Gilbert and Greta Garbo wading through six reels of rubbish, and one hears, meanwhile, parts of Brahm's second symphony, and the third act of Die Walkilre. Naturally, one is hypnotized into believing that the sentimental nonsense depicted on the screen is emotionally important. The all-talking picture, on the other hand, must depend for its effectiveness wholly upon the intrinsic qualities of its action and dialogue; and the enormity of that task may be divined by observing the dire happenings of any average New' York theatrical season.

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The film that talks only a little has consequently a great advantage over its more elaborate rival. It may have music throughout most of its length; it may employ all the spectacular effects of the silent picture—crowds, large exteriors, dissolves, fade-ins, double exposures, and the like—and may fall into speech at moments of real dramatic tenseness, those moments when spoken words are infinitely more effective than music or subtitles. The talking feature will, presumably, be embodied in all future elaborate films.

The all-talking picture will probably break away to become an entirely separate art. I can imagine successful New York plays being canned and sent out to the provinces, thus dealing the ultimate death-blow to the theatrical road company. Its greatest usefulness, I should think, will be—at least eventually— in the preparation of brilliantly cast and acted versions of the dramatic classics. Fifty years from now the average American public library, in addition to offering its shelves full of the printed works of Shakespeare, Moliere, Ibsen, and Shaw, may offer likewise a group of projection rooms and a complete canned collection of these same plays.

One will go in, fill out a card, and forthwith see Romeo and Juliet. Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Rosrnersholm or Man and Superman, produced on such an elaborate scale, and acted by such a distinguished cast, as the present-day drama lover can see oidy in his dreams. But even at that time such productions will be considered a branch of the theatre rather than of the movies. For the movies, I imagine, will still be in their infancy.