It was too good a picture for the American market, at this stage.
On the other hand, if a picture has certain fundamental points of popular appeal, a romantic love-story or a thrilling climax or a wonderful setting of unusual beauty or charm, and good selling-points as well, such as a famous author or a great star, it can be just as good as anybody is able to make it. Under those circumstances it cannot be too good. Look at the best Griffith pictures, or the best Rex Ingram pictures, or the best pictures that Douglas Fairbanks has made, like “Robin Hood,” or the best that Mary Pickford has made, or Charles Chaplin, or Harold Lloyd.
So far, there has been one great stumbling-block in the way of better pictures. It has even affected such great producers as Griffith and Ingram. They have been afraid of doing the very best they were capable of, for fear of being “too good.” They were afraid of being “over the heads” of too many people in the audience. They were afraid of not having enough “popular appeal.”
That is why, in “Way Down East” Griffith stooped to cheap “slap-stick” comedy that was really beneath, and incidentally really less funny than, what he might have done. It was why Rex Ingram, in “Turn to the Right” made a picture that was about down to the level of an eight-year-old child, in spite of its beautiful production. It was why such pictures as Universal’s “Merry-go-’Round” drop to cheap and overdrawn sentimentality in places, instead of sticking to the real thing.
The danger with distributors and exhibitors as well as producers, is that they are afraid of losing money on pictures that are “too good.”
What they are afraid of is a real danger: it is true that pictures may be “too good.” That is, not interesting enough in a popular sense, in spite of their artistic excellence.
If only producers and distributors and exhibitors could all get pictures that were just as good as they could possibly be without being “too good,” we’d be all right.
It’s safer, though, from a money standpoint, to have pictures a little below than a little above the line that marks the limit of popular appreciation. At least, for a while.
There we have the whole problem of how to get better pictures: daring to keep right on the border line of popular taste, without trying to play too safe by sagging away down below it, in an effort to appeal to greater numbers of people.
There’s a curious thing about this problem. Great numbers of people will keep away from pictures that seem to them too “highbrow” to be interesting. But on the other hand, unless pictures are good enough to keep people feeling that they are getting something worth-while, after a while they will stop going to that kind, also.