The Movie Peril and the Spoken Play

The Futility, of Becoming Alarmed about the Future of what is Called the Drama

FRANK MOORE COLBY

IT seems to me that, instead of worrying lest the movies in America should kill our spoken drama, dramatic critics ought to be thankful that the spoken drama runs any risk of being killed. If it cannot survive that particular sort of peril, it ought to die.

To call the movie stage cheap and silly and vulgar does not seem to bear on the question, for that is precisely what dramatic critics have been thinking of nine American plays out of ten ever since I can remember.

The degree of cheapness, silliness and vulgarity may be important from the point of view of sociology, but it is not important from the point of view of dramatic art. If it is the question of the flow of capital from the movies to the drama, dramatic critics have no more reason to become excited over it than over the flow of capital from soap to shoes. If the majority of the "legitimate" theatrical managers went, body and soul, into film production, there would be just as much hope of the rebirth of the age of Pericles, in the spoken drama, as there is now. There would be just as much hope if Mr. Lasky, and the rest of the movie magnates, entered the temple of the spoken drama endowed with a billion dollars. The effects that such changes might have on the American drama, especially if you happen to remember that the American drama does not exist, is a question over which our persistent intellectuals have too easily become deranged.

There is fear, apparently, that unscrupulous movie financiers may no longer be actuated by pure aesthetic motives; that former members of New York theatrical syndicates, once, ready, to a man, to die of starvation if only dramatic genius might find expression, may be dragged down to the commercial level of the screen; that Wall Street, fairy godmother hitherto of all that is purest in the arts, may sell itself to movie enterprises for mere gold.

Mr. Hay man as Maecenas

NOW I do not recall any period of our history when this view of the relation between American capital and the American drama was held. It was certainly not held by the sort of people who are now afraid of these changes. None of them used to refer to Mr. Alf Hayman, as Maecenas, for example;—to compare Mr. Klaw or Mr. Erlanger, to Louis XIV. The late Charles Frohman was respected, to be sure, but he was not likened to Queen Elizabeth and he was never called a harbinger of a new artistic dawn. Nobody called the Lieblers the Morning Stars of the Reformation.

Beautiful as capitalists may be in their expression of personal initiative, it was generally admitted that they were not developing a great deal of personal initiative in American plays. On the contrary, it was commonly said that they were not developing anything. Quantities of capital going in and nothing whatever of a dramatic nature coming out—that was the prevailing impression of the American stage even among the very persons who are now so afraid of the movies. They did not build their hopes on the presence of capitalist producers; they built them on the disappearance of capi-

talist producers. Their expressions on this subject were, if anything, too harsh. They said that so long as these gentlemen remained, the American drama would never be born. They are now saying that if this same sort of gentlemen should ever go away, the American drama would perish.

Brilliant Audiences

THE flow of money from the spoken drama to the movie screen may, I think, be observed with a good deal of calmness. One of the chief questions about most of the American plays in our history is why money should have been spent on them at all.

And it is the same way with the interest of our wealthy classes in the stage. The less interest they take in any art the better it is for the art. That the sort of people who have hitherto taken an interest in the theatre should no longer take an interest in the theatre is not an occasion for despair, but for hopefulness. This is shown by the history of what has always been known as our "brilliant" audiences —the species of audiences most highly prized by theatrical producers.

It would not be quite true to say that the more brilliant the audience, the stupider the play, because an exact proportion in these matters does not always hold good. Foreign prestige, intellectual cachet, or the high reputation of an actor, may lure a brilliant audience into plays which it would naturally dislike. You may see a brilliant audience at certain Shakespeare performances, as at certain funerals, and a brilliant audience will sometimes wait to the end of a play concealed in some foreign language with the same patience that it would wait for a train. Nor is it true that its heart always goes out to every imbecile production. But it is a safe rule to lay down that when its heart does go out, the production is always imbecile, and that as its enthusiasm mounts, so does the imbecility.

The boundless enthusiasm of a really dazzling audience is a fearful indication of the state of the drama. You can guess, with a fair degree of certainty, that it is getting its final blow.

I have not frequented the American theatre for several years, as a play-reviewer, but I believe that if I were now to look in at a New York playhouse and see an audience all ablaze with diamonds and almost delirious with joy I should not have to see the play itself in order to describe it. I believe the simple string of imprecations I should set down on reaching home would be entirely adequate, from the point of view of dramatic criticism.

The story of the joys of brilliant audiences can never be told, for no man's memory is willing to retain the sort of thing that delighted them. One forgets successful American plays as one forgets dead insects. But no more deadly wounds could be inflicted on the spoken drama by the poorer classes than have been inflicted by the richer; and if brilliant audiences all flock to movie shows and desert the theatre, the existence of native drama is not endangered; in fact, the native drama might have a chance to exist.

No man need survey with unmixed gloom

any change whatever in the nature of American playgoers, no matter how revolutionary it is. Reduced to the patronage of a few hundred East Side Jews in New York, the drama might have an opportunity. At all events the more you saw of brilliant audiences, the better you liked the sort of people who went to the play in rags; and there were plenty of incidents in the history of the American stage that justified that preference.

With movies housed in all the best theatres in the country, there may yet be some real amusement in the bams. Perhaps playwrights can afford to be quite witty and spirited when they are not tempted into costly play-houses and paid huge sums to be the opposite.

Seen in certain aspects the destruction of the American drama by the films seems almost desirable. There is no knowing what a genial thing the American drama might be if deprived of all the money paid to it for being what it is. It is a strange man who, after studying a hundred plays or so, had not as lief see the American drama begin all over again and begin quite differently—in old barns, for example, at five cents a seat.

Does the American Drama Exist?

IN saying that the American drama does not exist, I mean that it is relatively non-existent. I do not, of course, mean to belittle certain clever American playwrights whose names will instantly come to mind. Mr. Augustus Thomas, Mr. George M. Cohan, the late Clyde Fitch, the late William Vaughan Moody, and a few others, are not only important figures in our dramatic literature; they are giants. But a dramatic literature in which figures of their stature are gigantic is not one that has got very far along. They are rare here, but elsewhere they are fairly numerous. A hundred years is not a long period in the history of the drama. But a hundred years of the American drama is about equal to five years of the French and ten of the English.

And the artistic nature of the results bears no relation to the outlay of capital. Considering what has happened on the American stage for a hundred years, it seems like carrying anxiety to a rather fine point to worry about what may happen to it.

If what critics have been saying for the last thirty years about the average play is true, it is impossible that the level of the average movie piece should be lower. To ask which of two things is worse for the intellect when neither pertains to the intellect at all, is to put an irrelevant question. It is as if an intellectual person, finding himself in the wrong place, were to ask which of his two legs had walked there the faster.

But it is the habit of our cultivated class always to regard the American public as falling, and it is a peculiar feature of their treatment of this theme, that while they are constantly talking about what the public has fallen to, they never give you the slightest notion of what the public has fallen from. There are dramatic critics who actually conceive of a large part of the human race as composed exclusively of other dramatic critics who have fallen. To some dramatic critics this sense of an almost universally fallen public is perhaps the sole assurance that they themselves are standing up.

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When they see ten mililon people enjoying an ordinary movie show, they never think of what those people were doing before they entered the movie show, or where they probably were. They simply think of them as falling down into that movie show from somewhere. That those people might have entered the average movie show without a fall, after reading, say, the speeches of a Presidential candidate, or after reading the average editorial on Bolshevism, or after poker, pinochle, comic supplements, home table-talk, club repartee, the stupendous novel of the week, and a thousand other kinds of averageness—including even an average spoken play—this never seems to dawn upon their minds.

Yet a man who will tremble for the human intellect at a movie show ought to shake like an aspen leaf almost everywhere. He ought to be far more iously alarmed when he reads the New York newspapers, and, if he would listen earnestly to the political conversation at his club for about an hour, he might even begin to talk about climbing up to Douglas Fairbanks or being educated to enjoy Charlie Chaplin.

Why should a man, reeling through the foolish processes of daily life, suddenly draw himself up, with drunken dignity, before a motion-picture screen, and say, with calculated hauteur: "My friend, this is not serious Art!"