Smash hit

And in a fragmentary affair like a movie where the last scenes may be taken first, the director must do the thinking for the actor. lf he is unable to, he does not belong on the platform of authority. After seeing what Chaplin did with that ex-cigarette-villain, Adolphe Menjou, and what Von Stroheim accomplished with the utterly inexperienced Mary Philbin, I believe that the alibi of incompetent acting will fall upon deaf ears.

Now directing, as the hack director understands it, is to be privy to all the outworn tricks of the trade. The hack director knows how to “visualise” every emotion — that is, he knows the rubber-stamp formula; he knows how every emotion has been visualised before. If in a picture, the hero departs from the heroine and the heroine wants him back, the hack director knows that she must take a step after him, hold out her hands toward him and then let them drop to her side. He knows that when someone dies in the street, this is always “visualised” by having a kneeling bystander take off his hat. If someone dies in a house, a sheet is invariably drawn over his face.

Very well, let us see how Chaplin, greatest of all directors, conveyed this latter event in A Woman of Paris. He realised that the old convention was outworn, that it no longer had the power of calling the emotions to attention, so he invented a new way. The audience does not see the dying man at all; it sees the backs of the surrounding crowd and suddenly a waiter pushes his way out of that crowd, shaking his head. At once the whole horrible violence of the suicide is plain to us. We even understand the human vanity of the waiter in wanting to be first to convey the news.

We may forget that incident because the picture is full of spanking new effects but, when it is over, every bit of it, despite the shoddy mounting and the sentimentalised story, seems vastly important. Chaplin has a fine imaginative mind and he threw himself hard into his picture. It is the lazy man, the “wise old-timer” — in other words, the hack — who takes the timeworn easy way.

All I am saying comes down to this — the chief business of a director is to invent new business to express old emotions.

An “original” picture is not a story of a lunatic wanting the North Star. It is the story of a little girl wanting a piece of candy — but our attention must be called with sharp novelty to the fact that she wants it. The valuable director is not he who makes a dull “artistic” transcription of Conrad’s Victory — give me the fellow who can blow the breath of life into a soggy gum-drop like Pollyanna.

Perhaps such men will appear. We have Griffith — just when he seems to be exhausted, he has a way of sitting up suddenly in his grave.

We have Cruze, who can be forgiven The Covered Wagon, if only for the amazing dream scene in Hollywood. We have Von Stroheim, who has a touch of real civilisation in his make-up and, greatest of all, Chaplin, who almost invented the movies as a vehicle for personal expression.

There are half a dozen others I could name — Sennett, Lubitsch, Ingram, Cecil B. DeMille, Dwan — who in the last five years have made two or three big successes interspersed with countless reels of drooling mediocrity, but I have my doubts about them; we must demand more than that.

As for the rest of the directors — let a thick, impenetrable curtain fall.

Occasionally, a picture made by some jitney (five-cent) Griffith is successful because of the intelligence of self-directing stars — but beware of such accidents.

The man’s next effort is likely to show the true barrenness and vulgarity of his mind.

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