Another fact which I acquired is that unless the face of the cinema performer is painted yellow it comes out an impossible hue, so that to see a company in broad daylight is to have the impression that one has stumbled upon a house party in the Canary Isles. And a third fact is that the actors, while free to say what they like to each other at many times, must, when in a situation illustrated by words thrown on the screen, use those identical words. One reason for this rule is, I am told, that some time ago, in an American film, the producer of which was rather lax, one of the characters spoke to another with an impossible licence, and a school of deaf mutes visiting the picture palace "lip-read" the awful result. The consequence (America being a wonderful country, with a sufficiency of deaf-and-dumb to warrant protective measures) was the withdrawal of the film and the punishment of the offenders.
Meanwhile, what of the horse? I will tell you.
The camera-operator having taken as much of the fast life in the swell hotel (with the hollow columns without backs to them) as was necessary, including a "still" (as it is called in the movie world—meaning a photograph in the ordinary sense of the term) of the fluffiest of the adventuresses in an expression signifying a blend of depravity and triumph, turned his attention to the loose-box which some attendants had been rapidly constructing, chiefly with the assistance of a truss of straw. Into this apartment was led (through the hotel lounge, and at enormous risk to its plaster masonry) a horse—the horse, in fact, which was to defeat Edison. Of the plot of the play I know nothing. (How could I, having seen it in preparation?) But this I can tell you: that the hero's horse had to be ill; and this also: that the horse in question refused to be ill. In vain for the groom to shake his head, in vain for the hero to say that it had the shivers; never was a horse so far removed from malady, so little in need of the vet. Nor could any device produce the desired effect. If, then, in the days to come you see on the films a very attractive story with a horse in it, and the horse shivers only in the words on the screen, you will know why. It is because the movies for once met their master.
THE NEWNESS OF THE OLD
In an American paper I find this anecdote: "An old lady was being shown the spot on which a hero fell. 'I don't wonder,' she replied. 'It's so slippery I nearly fell there myself.'"
Now that story, which is very old in England, and is familiar here to most adult persons, is usually told of Nelson and the Victory. Indeed it is such a commonplace with facetious visitors to that vessel that the wiser of the guides are at pains to get in with it first. But in America it may be fresh and beginning a new lease of life; it will probably go on forever in all English-speaking countries, on each occasion of its recrudescence finding a few people to whom it is new.
It is a problem why we tend to be so resentful when an editor or a comedian offers us a jest that has done service before. It is, I suppose, in part at any rate, because we have paid our money, either for the paper or the seat, and we experience the sense of having been defrauded. We have been done, we feel, because the bargain, as we understood it, was that we were purchasing novelty. So that when suddenly an old, old jape, which perhaps we have ourselves related—and that of course is an aggravation of the grievance—confronts us, we are indignant. But what, one wonders, would a comic paper or a revue that had nothing old in it be like. We can never know.
The odd thing is that we not only resent the age of the joke, even though it is in our own repertory, but we resent the laughter of those to whom it is new—perhaps three-quarters of the audience. How dare they also not have heard it before? is our unspoken question. Not long ago, seated in a theatre next a candid and normally benignant and tolerant friend, I found myself laughing at what struck me as a distinctly humorous remark made by one of London's nonsensical funny men. Engaged in a competition with another as to which had the longer memory, he clinched the discussion by saying that he personally could remember London Bridge when it was a cornfield. To me that was as new as it was idiotic, and I behaved accordingly; but my friend was furious with me. "Good heavens!" he exclaimed with the click of the tongue that usually accompanies such criticism, "fancy digging that up again! It's as old as the hills." And his face grew dark and stern.