With the movie makers

by Myron M. Stearns

Let us look at some facts about story-telling.

Whenever we watch motion pictures, we see somebody doing something, somewhere.

It may be a young fellow from the country, who has come to the city to make his fortune, and finds work as a truck-driver, hauling piano-boxes that are filled with rifles for shipment to the Soviet. It may be a girl who decided to wake up “Ellum Center” by putting in a real live department store. It may be an old man who sails away to the South Seas to try to locate his runaway grandson, and finds a pearl island as well. But always it is somebody, somewhere, doing something.

Those three things are the foundations on which all story-telling is built. People—the things they do—and the places they do them in. Characters, action, and locale.

It may happen that the people in our picture are merely travelers, looking at strange scenes in Siam. In that case, we call the picture a travelogue; the emphasis is neither on the people, nor what they do; instead, it is on the place they happen to be—Siam. We watch for elephants or queer bullock-drawn carts and odd houses and think nothing at all about whether or not the lady with the parasol is going to marry the man who feeds the elephant.

Frequently we find more or less conventional heroes or heroines engaged in death-defying feats and adventures, with all the emphasis on what they do, and little enough on what they are. That is the usual trend of melodrama.

More rarely, we find really interesting people—children with a slant of ingenuity that makes the old folks sit up and take notice—a man with a temper that gets him into trouble until he finally manages, when the big test comes, to control it. Such films are usually of the better class.

Mostly, we see a blend of all three things. In “The Three Musketeers” Douglas Fairbanks gives us a little more of characterization than the average hero has (we can feel his wit, his audacity, his resourcefulness and loyalty) and shows us as well the thrilling episodes of a fast-moving plot, in the alluring setting of romantic France, a century and more ago. In Charles Ray’s pictures we find still more of characterization, in a winning personality that usually has humor, modesty, ambition, sincerity, and naturalness; but there is a lot of interest that attaches to his trials and tribulations in the small town where he lives. With Bill Hart we feel real character again—cool courage, restraint, a fine spirit of fair play—and always interesting doings against the fascinating background of the cattle country.

Now it is in the excellencies or defects of these three things—characters, action, and locale—that we find good or poor photoplays.

Don’t be afraid that, to learn to be able to tell good pictures when you see them, you have got to watch tiresome pictures. To be really good, photoplays must be interesting. Emerson, I believe, lays down somewhere three rules for reading books—never to read a book that isn’t a year old, never to read a book that isn’t famous, and never to read a book that you don’t like. With photoplays, we might perhaps say: never go to a photoplay that hasn’t somewhere at least a good criticism (that is, real praise from some one you know or whose opinion you can respect), and never go to a photoplay of a kind you don’t like. Whether or not it is the kind you like, you can tell by noting the stars, the director, and the producing company or brand.