With the movie makers

by Myron M. Stearns

Since the very first, Griffith has remained almost the only one of our real story-telling producer-directors who has put individuality and authorship above the box-office returns. Even he doesn’t do it consciously; he tries, I suppose, to make pictures, as all the rest do, that will attract the largest audiences. But he has ideas and prejudices and opinions of his own—the things that make for individuality and leadership—and he would rather lose every dollar he has ever made than give them up.

While abroad the work is commercialized, too, just as ours is, there is a little more vision in it, and in some ways the films are better.

“Gypsy Blood,” “Deception,” “The Golem,” the “Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” “Our Mutual Friend,” “Carnival,” “I Accuse,” “Theodora,” “Hamlet,” “Peter the Great,” and a good many more have made tremendous records for themselves in this country. German, Norwegian, French, Italian, English.

Almost as if in reply, Douglas Fairbanks and Griffith made respectively “Robin Hood” and “Orphans of the Storm.” They gave us a good chance to compare our best home product with the foreign-made article.

The Fairbanks and Griffith pictures show that we can at least equal the German and other foreign films, if we try. Both these American pictures have a pictorial beauty that no foreign picture has ever equaled. The Fairbanks film has a suspense, and the Griffith picture both feeling and excitement, that no picture made outside of this country has ever shown.

So, we can lead the world, if we will. But unfortunately, those two pictures are exceptions. One can name a few more, like “Little Lord Fauntleroy,” “Humoresque,” and “Over the Hill,” that are good enough to hold their own with the best producers elsewhere; but that is about all. The run of our American-made pictures are not good enough, to-day, to deserve world supremacy.

That is something to think about.

The German pictures, as well as those of some of the other foreign countries, have certain qualities, resulting from an unwillingness to compromise with ideals, that allow them, as a class, to outrank ours. For instance, while the Germans desire beauty, just as we do, and would like to have their heroine as beautiful as ours, they also desire a real ability to act. If they can not have both, they will let the beauty go, and take the real acting. We will not; we let the ability go, and stick to the pretty flappers. Accordingly, in American pictures, our leading actors and actresses are almost always good-looking—and frequently poor at acting.

It is the same about truth, or the sense of reality. We sacrifice convincingness—fidelity to life—truth—to our desire for youth and beauty. If we could have both, well and good; but it is impossible. Accordingly, on the American screen, we see, again and again, our beautiful little flapper friends playing parts that should be taken by older women—not so young and pretty, perhaps, but true to life, instead of childish caricatures of truth.

Even with Griffith’s “Orphans of the Storm,” we see still another sacrifice of an ideal—one might almost say principle. That is the giving up of historical value, and big things, for excitement, and little things. The French Revolution is a tremendous story in itself; in the foreign made films it is made the backbone of the whole story; in Griffith’s film, it is merely a background, while the “main” story is centered about one or two appealing characters, that mean, except for momentary entertainment, little or nothing. It is a question of Lillian and Dorothy Gish being more important, on this side of the Atlantic, than the French Revolution; but on the other side, when the French Revolution is filmed, it is more important than the great actress who plays in the picture—Pola Negri.