GINGERBREAD WITH THE GILT OFF

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 384, 19 June 1928, Page 5

GINGERBREAD WITH THE GILT OFF

BUT WE LOVE IT, ALL THE SAME The other day I felt considerably peeved by a too graphic newspaper account, complete with illustration, of the “shooting” of certain "stunt” scenes in a forthcoming film. Then laughed away my chagrin, knowing full well that, when I go to see the finished picture, the memory of how the wires are pulled won’t get between me and my school-girlish shudders when the thrills run down my spine. That’s the best of the “movies.” There is such a potential hiatus between the shots and the fait accompli. To attend rehearsals of a stage play is to have a pretty adequate conception of the whole thing. But fo follow gaspingly in the whimsical wake of a movie director as he tackles his job, now here, now there, now north, now south, and in any old scenic order that best fits in with time, place and circumstances of wind and weather, i 3 to get nowhere near the preliminary assembling and cutting and sub-titling, let alone the ultimate picture in all its mysteriously unfolded sequence. That is always a revelation, to the movie artists no less than to their audiences. So it doesn’t matter one jot how assiduously the “stunts” are given away. We know we are being spoofed. But who cares, when camera and captionist present the crowning illusion, and the “stunt” takes its place among illusion’s realities? What does it signify that we no longer remain In childlike ignorance of the “dummy” that takes the villain’s place when he is hurled over the cliff; or that wears the hero’s plus-fours when his trusty automobile races madly onward to the heroine’s rescue at the risk of selfdestruction? That is the sublime advantage of the screen over the stage; the colossal superiority of its spoofscope. A picture’s a picture; and there you are. Not a secret does the movie studio hold. All the gilt is off the gingerbread of its technique. But the stunt merchants know—and we know—that it makes no odds. They can vaunt the sheer spoof of their artistry and then impose the spoof on us as the real thing. And we can admire the ingenuity of the real thing, and forget it in sublimely recaptured Illusions.