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.