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.