Cinema: The New Pictures Apr. 8, 1929

Shady Lady (Pathe). Pretty Phyllis Haver, wanted in Manhattan for murder, lives comfortably but not idly in a hotel in Havana, Cuba, where she falls in love with a rumrunner. Good atmosphere and acting almost succeed in turning into realism the neat melodramatics that make possible a happy ending. The picture is silent except for a final talking sequence and a theme song that goes “Shady Lady, Shady Lady! Girl of my dreams.” Best shots—hotel life in Havana.

The Trial of Mary Dugan (Metro Goldwyn Mayer). Once more the unity of time and scene and the concentration of dialog made possible by a courtroom play have been utilized in an effective sound-picture. The story, adapted without alteration from a recent stage success, and directed by the author, Bayard Veiller, concerns a showgirl, who is tried for the murder of her lover and is defended by her brother, a lawyer. Best shot—Norma Shearer telling how she paid for her brother’s education.

The Passion of Joan of Arc (French). You might not think there could be any new way of telling a story in pictures, until you see this film in which the trial and death of Joan of Arc are told, in silence, by the expression of faces not disfigured by make-up and photographed from all angles, mostly in closeup. Director Carl Theodore Dreyer, a Dane, is not concerned with history, except that he uses accurately and intelligently such evidence as the 15th Century has left him about the girl who saved her country from its enemies, and was later tortured to death by the Church. Somehow Dreyer found a woman, Mile. Falconetti, whose face was what he looked for, and whose talent directed as well as fulfilled his own “directing.”

Together, Dreyer and Falconetti have made the girl whom Mark Twain saw as through the eyes of an amiable, schoolgirlish companion, and whom Bernard Shaw created as a healthy, quick-witted English girl of the fox-hunting type, a person whom the spectator recognizes as someone revealed for the first time, yet who has always been known to everybody. She is answering her judges at a moment when she is forced to renounce either her life or her faith.

Mile. Falconetti’s face is sunburned and her lips are shrunken and seem dry; thin lines mark her forehead, her rough hair, cut short, fits her head like a wooden cap. She is ugly, but her eyes are beautiful, and as her thought makes changes in her face she too becomes beautiful. At first, she seems paralyzed with amazement and terror; later, from some unexplained emotion, she weeps”, and through the trial big tears run down her tanned face. Her answers in the subtitles are the same that were given by the real Joan according to the record of the ecclesiastical trial at Rouen preserved in the Library of the Chamber of Deputies in Paris.

Q: You say you saw St. Michael. Was he naked? . . .

Joan: Do you think God would have nothing to dress him in? …

Q: Did he have hair? . . .

Joan: Why not? . . .

Q: Are you in a state of grace? . . .

Joan: If I am not, I beseech God to bring me to that State. If I am, I pray that He may preserve me so. . . .

She signs the admission that she was inspired by the devil, then takes it back, and goes to the stake. “Where shall I be this evening, Father?” Her death in the fire, watched by soldiers, priests, jongleurs, and old women, under the wheeling pigeons in the Place du Vieux Marche, is the only episode beside her trial in a picture that is one of the four or five authentic master pieces in the young art of the cinema.

Colossal Enterprise

To the cinema world there came the announcement, last week, that henceforth William Fox, head of Fox Film Corp., would produce only talking pictures. Inasmuch as Talker Fox, through his recent (TIME, March 18) acquisition of Loew’s, Inc., had become possibly Greatest Film Man (succeeding Adolph Zukor, head of Paramount-Famous Players-Lasky Corp.) his announcement was widely interpreted as “dooming” the silent picture. Furthermore, as Mr. Fox also announced that he had secured the services of some 200 “legitimate” actors, stage-directors, dialog-writers and dramatists, singers, dancers and musical comedy producers and composers, it was also felt that the entire theatrical world was about to undertake a Hollywood migration. Given tongue, the cinema appeared also to have been given teeth. It had seemingly cast itself for the role of the Wolf, with the silent cinema as the Old Grandmother and the speaking stage as Little Red Riding Hood.

Yet, even as the tumult and the shouting rose, it was questionable whether the captains and kings would depart. Certainly the Fox program was not quite as radical as might have been first concluded. Most of the feature pictures now in production by the more representative film companies are being made with both a silent and a talking version. Thus Universal Film and Paramount continue to make duplicate prints, one talking, the other silent, one for “wired” and one for non-wired theatres.

It is this question of wired houses (i.e., cinemansions equipped to produce talking pictures) that assures the silent film of at least a lingering death. There are more than 15,000 U. S. picture houses, of which only about 2,000 now have sound equipment. Thus Fox competitors argue that immediate discontinuance of the silent film is premature. But W. R. Sheehan, Fox General Manager, argues that at least 3,000 cinema cathedrals will have acquired vocal chords by Jan. 1, 1931, and that 8,000 are certain to become eventual members of the talking fraternity. In the foreign field, however, Mr. Fox obviously faces a severe handicap unless he can endow his pictures not only with the gift of speech but with the gift of tongues as well. However, he will not have to rely wholly on his “talkies” until he has used up an 18-months’ supply of “dummies.” As far as the future of the cinema is concerned, it would appear that all “big” pictures of the morrow will be “talkies,” but that many of them will be accompanied by a silent partner for the benefit of the farmer and the foreigner.

“Legit.” As to the legitimate stage, Mr. Fox has undoubtedly corralled a large number of its outstanding luminaries, including Actors Will Rogers, George Jessel, Clark and McCullough, Helen Chandler, and Authors Zoe Akins, Gilbert Emery, Cyril Hume, Owen Davis, George Middleton, Clare Kummer and many another. Prospective Fox talking features include Earl Derr Diggers’ Behind That Curtain, Laurence Stallings’ and Maxwell Anderson’s The Cock-Eyed World, Jerome K. Jerome’s The Passing of the Third Floor Back, and the first of an annual revue series called Fox Movietone Follies.*

Legitimate actors, who long have repeated the slur that the only two-syllable word that Hollywood knows how to pronounce is “fil-lum,” may not forget their gibing and journey toward the west. Broadway producers, however, shrugged shoulders at the talkie threat. Said Arthur Hammerstein: “The public . . . is skeptical. . . .” Said Florenz Ziegfeld: “Beauty in the flesh will continue to rule the world.” It is obvious that, even if speaking cinemas lose their present lisp and rasp, the illusion produced by an articulate photograph of John Barrymore as Hamlet can never be as satisfying as the illusion produced by Actor Barrymore himself. What is at present the talkies’ outstanding attraction—the fact that a picture can talk†must, after its novelty has disappeared, become their outstanding limitation—the fact that it is only a picture that is talking. The greatest menace to the contemporary theatre would appear to be, not good talkies, but bad plays.

Pale, sharp-featured, Cineman Fox plasters his thin hair over his head to make it reach as far as possible. With a similar objective, but with greater success, he has recently expanded with purchase after purchase his enormous business organization. Born in Tulchva, Hungary, in 1879, he came, a small boy, to Manhattan’s East Side, there peddled shoe polish which his father made over the family stove. Later, he sponged pants, coats in a Manhattan tailoring shop. Still later he cut out cloak and suit patterns for $17 a week. Twenty-five years ago, when feature pictures were 500 feet long, Cineman Fox opened, in Brooklyn, his first theatre. Nobody came to see the show, so finally he hired sleight-of-hand artists to do tricks in the lobby and attract a crowd. There followed many a theatre in Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx, and eventual expansion into one of the world’s most colossal enterprises ruled by one man.

Meanwhile cinemactors and cinemac tresses wondered whether the new cine-monstrosity would terminate their careers, as the talking picture obviously demands an adequate vocal as well as a pleasing scenic effect. One result of this wonder ment was last week’s announcement that United Artists combined into United Artists Consolidated, Inc. The United Artists are nine producers — Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charles Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, Gloria Swanson, Samuel Goldwyn, Feature Productions, Inc., Art Cinema Co., and United Artists Studios, Inc. They have been “united” chiefly in the sense that they have had a common film manufacturing plant. In their new union their identities as producers will be lost, their identities as actors retained. Further more, it is expected that a half interest in their company will be sold to Warner Bros, (pioneer Talkers) for some $20,000,000. United Artists Consolidated, Inc., plans to produce twelve talking pictures during the present year.

*Compare with Fox features recently opened in Manhattan: Street Angel (sound) with Janet Gaynor; Red Dance (sound) with Delores Del Rio; The River (sound) with Mary Duncan and Charles Farrell; Strong Boy with Victor McLaglen and Leatrice Joy.

†Just as the original cinema presented a sensation in a picture that moved.