There are, too, the wearisome conventions of western mining camp life as shown on the motion picture screen. Perhaps censor boards and writers have contributed in producing these conventions; chief of which is the fact that every dance hall queen is virtue personified, a Pollyanna in spangles, but they are conventions and unreal ones, nevertheless.
There is the unreal mother of the films. The convention is that if she is a fond and loving mother she must sit and knit and sit and knit and occasionally wipe away a tear or two. And if she is not represented thus, as fond and motherly, she must be represented as an impossible social climber or a freak feminist on a par with the suffragettes of burlesque shows ten years ago. Normal mothers reach the screen once in a hundred times.
It is granted again that screen writers and censor boards have assisted considerably in building up these false conventions, but the director is the lucky fellow that has it in his power to change them. Let him go about his task gradually if he so wishes, but let him go about it.
Only recently I had cause to give complaint to the practice of directors in identifying cigarettes solely with villains. Some of the screen villains have actually been permitted to reach the point in their careers when the mere manner of toying with a cigarette signifies some specific course of villainy. Their actions with cigarettes are as plain as the old-fashioned moustachioed villain's actions when he strode upon the stage and pronounced “Curses!”
Such a convention is altogether too dangerous besides being funny. The reformers have already begun to associate the cigarette with villainy. And if the directors, through their villains, allow them to go that way, we will soon see the departure of cigarettes from our midst altogether, even as the lamented drink has departed—or is supposed to have departed.
I, for one, am going to blame the directors for such a state of affairs. When a cigarette-legger approaches me in future years and whispers, “I know where you can get a package of your favorite brand for two dollars,” I'm going to hit him and curse the director and his conventions that he wouldn't change even when I thus warned him.
Chapter XXIII
ERNST LUBITSCH: GERMAN DIRECTOR
Lubitsch, on his first visit to American shores, gives some few of his ideas on picture directing.—“Passion,” “Deception,” and “The Wife of Pharaoh” are proof of his skill but he has faults and can afford to absorb much of the technique of the American director.—His discovery of Pola Negri a great stroke
Chapter XXIII
Earlier mention has been made in these pages to German pictures. Lest this term be confusing to those without the picture trade and in the hinterlands, it may be explained that these recently imported pictures are generally advertised as “European pictures,” “continental spectacles” or with any blanket descriptive phrase that possibly but not pointedly includes Germany. There seems to be no good cause for refusing to give the spade its proper name today and if there are still those unacquainted with the fact, it can here be announced that “Passion,” “Deception,” “The Golem,” “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” “One Arabian Night,” etc., etc., were all produced in Germany.