Will the Cinema Kill the Stage?

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 50, 21 May 1927, Page 21 (Supplement)

Will the Cinema Kill the Stage?

S. P. B. Mais Says That It Never Will

LONDON CRITICS OPINION Although there are. people who firmly believe that the cinema will eventually kill the stage, *S\ I*. B. Mais, the celebrated critic and writer , gives his reasons why this will never come about. Nothing, he says, can ever compare with the spoken voice in the heat and action of a play. Basil Dean, I am told, is deserting the theatre for the film on the ground that the stage is played out. If the news is true, I am glad of it, for the cinema people can do with all the producers of imagination that the theatre can spare them. I am less certain that he has any grounds for his assertion, if he ever made it, that the stage is about to sing its swansong. I have now had about three months’ rest from the reading of newspapers and the witnessing of plays for pay. The result has been that I have been to a great number of films. After a day in the open air I tind the cinema less tiring than dancing. The seats : are cheap and comfortable, though the atmosphere is invariably more foetid than it is in a theatre. You can go in and come out at any time and it is, I think, as an entertainment, comparable with a variety show. You get stupendous effects as in “Ben Hur," yom get good acting as in Dorothy Gish's interpretation of “Nell Gwyn,” you get humour in Harold Lloyd’s “For Heaven's Sake,” you get a sort of vicarious glow as you catch all too •hort glimpses of international Rugger matches at Twickenham, ski-jumping it Wengen, and horses falling at Becher’s in the National. But all this Is little compensation for the long hours of horror watching attempts at humour where the producer relies for his laughter wholly on the discomfort of the actor. You have to watch ttater slowly rising in a bath, pouring into bedrooms through ceilings, you. are expected to laugh at the antics of a man swallowing a hot potato, as if one couldn’t do that every day in any restaurant, you are expected to witness with relish the sight of a fat froman in evening dress plaster her face with cream or lime, and still they T'ork the old gag of making a car or man go about a thousand times its or his ordinary speed by turning a handle and expect you to roar. CRUDE TRAGEDY

Far worse than these vulgar crude attempts at humour are the vulgar •crude attempts at tragedy. I have Just seen "Manon Lescaut.” I hope the Khost of the Abbe Prevost and Massenet were spared the sight. It would e unkind to mention the performers r y ..^ ame - I went to this show because . e to see him versions of famous s * anc l also because the Press otices were exceptionally eulogistic. Possesses no merit whatever, except certain slickness in its realism; one leves in the authenticity of the cosmes and in nothing else. It beomes impossible after one glance at faces of the hero and heroine to * w hat happens to them at any ihft stor *y* To procure money tim gIF - muy 8:0 away and live for a the ogre-like marquis. Our remain unwrung as we wait I lentJ y for her return and death, and tain Patlently for the fall of the curjoJ 1 ' The theatre has not sunk so th> neec * foar anything from is pe competitor. And the truth v aa jf the odds are tremendously on yon r hit . ting on a n indifferent film if wit . 80 in to the nearest picture house . nou t first investigating its bill of all • * might become a film fan if of S? tures were up to the standard h ad ~” e Volga Boatman,” but I have ;• « to endure so many hours of irri- ‘ an d boredom in my search for a ti,. nlm, that I shall soon go back to ne theatres again. b AD PLAYS v. BAD FILMS ♦u kad Play is much more amusing a bad film, just as a good play is sari S? USand times more aesthetically re<rfn than a good film. I cannot m le °t any film that has pleased me than “The Atonement of Gosta p fi nB, ’ nn adaptation of a Nobel sidA e « n w Vel k y a Dane. But put it be--jj Thorndike’s stage revival of Shak etl1 ’ * not one of the happiest of you KeSPearean rev ivals. perhaps, and "*• at once what it is that will filrv,, the sta &c alive, however much v a re improved. • lng in scenic effect and photoforn! C splen dour can compensate us flash i spoken word. It is no \ise v era J nff grea J passages of prose and ty e on the screen; they leave us cold. a cl0 p V at hear them spoken by a great Play ln t * ie heat and action of a

'omn« re . 18 n °thing yet on the films 1^ 16 in su htlety. wit, genius, frith er^sa tion, psychology or humour frond rch ? hov or even O’Casey. The i s er with this new art is not that it be tt Sood, but that it hasn’t done had n ' In its beginnings the stage *tr ° auc 'h obstacles to success Put its path as the cinema has aUs own way. Even nowadays,

w hen there is a distinct divorce between literature and the theatre, some artists have contrived to be giants of literature and giants in the theatre at the same time, Bernard Shaw for instance. But where are the Shaw, the Barrie and the Galsworthy of the the films? They haven’t even produced a Coward. MELODIES UNHEARD It isn't that one requires the cinema to aim at intricate psychology. One isn t asking for an E. M. Forster. But it does seem strange that on the straight side of adventure it hasn’t done better. Will the film version of Masefield’s “Sard Harker” be one-tenth as exciting as the original romance? With all their lavish wealth of detah are Sabatini’s film versions in the same world as his stories? The truth is that one’s imagination is so much richer than anything that the cinemaproducer can provide that his task is totally unequal. Just as melodies unheard are sweeter, so are sights unseen far more magnificent, and for the matter of that, more authentic. We do not, in this age, believe that which we see. We only believe that which we do not see. The only credible things on the films are the sights they leave out. But in the end. just as broadcasting will never oust the concert or the lecture, because of the personal actual proximity required by most of us of the performer, so has the theatre nothing to fear from the cinema so long as actors and actresses retain any personality or roofs to their mouths.