De Bello Gallico Americanoque

Concerning a Narrowly Averted International Crisis and a Few Remarks About French Films

DEEMS TAYLOR

THE war that threatened to break out last spring between the United States and France has been finally averted. I refer, of course, to the great Movie War, which, had it actually burst over the two nations, would have dragged millions of dollars and francs from their civilian retreats to risk destruction and mutilation, would have brought ruin and desolation upon thousands of pocket-books, and would have darkened the declining years of hundreds of motion picture magnates.

What caused the crisis was a measure proposed by Edouard Herriot, the French Minister of Fine Arts, whereby the American film manufacturers would have to buy and exhibit one French film for every four of their own that they sold in France. What followed is history. Mr. Will Hays, who had been peacefully judgelandissing pictures in Hollywood, moved instantly and with great velocity in an easterly direction by means of pony express, covered wagon, railway, motor car, airplane, and steamer, eventually arriving in Paris upon what he announced to the anxious press as a pleasure trip. While Mr. Hays and M. Herriot were presumably making the rounds of the Louvre, Napoleon's Tomb, the Eiffel Tower, and the Cluny Museum, the American film interests abroad were uttering piercing screams of agony, encouraged, oddly enougn, by the French newspapers.

THE Americans pointed out that the prices charged for French films were higher than they could afford, that American audiences wouldn't look at them if they did buy them, that there was no profit, anyhow, in selling American films to France; that, in short, it the Herriot measure went through they would be compelled to close their French studios and theatres and throw thousands of Frenchmen out of work. The arguments of the French press were fewer and simpler. M. Herriot, besides being a cabinet minister, a famous former mayor of Lyons, a novelist, an amateur musician, and an essayist upon music and the allied arts, is a Socialist; and as all the more influential French papers are owned bypoliticians who are anything but Socialists, it was obvious that any measure proposed by M. Herriot was unsound, half-baked, economically ruinous, bolshevik, and totally unrepresentative of the spirit of 100% Frenchism.

Whether the Americans meant every word they said or whether they were bluffing it is impossible to say. For all I know, Mr. Hays may have found time, during his sightseeing trips, to talk a little business with M. Herriot. At all events, the Herriot measure was modified. The French government finally decided that the Americans need buy only one film for every seven that they sold; and, better yet, they needn't exhibit it in America if they didn't want to. The Americans dried their tears as if by magic; Mr. Hays ended his pleasure trip and went back to work; the French press went back to M. Poincare and the Rhine occupation; and all was well. The Yankee tourist in Paris this summer will still find the Paramount (Famous-Players) and the Gaumont Palace (Metro-Goldwyn) doing business as usual, the French movie fan can continue his habitual diet of Charlie Chaplin, Mary and Doug, Adolphe Menjou, Gloria Swanson, and Tom Mix, and the American movie fan won't have to look at any French films.

The most striking feature of the controversy was the emphasis with which the French newspapers pointed out that the French motion picture is inferior to the American product. When French newspapers —without whom the word "chauvinism" would not have had to be invented—admit, nay, insist, that something French is not as good as something foreign, that French something, one is justified in assuming, must be terrible.

TO tell the truth, the average French picture looks amateurish, compared with the average American picture. Having viewed the native product in considerable quantities, I can perfectly understand why the outstanding film successes in Paris last spring were Ben Hur, Le Roi des Rois, Chang, Adolphe Menjou in L'Homme en Habit, and Charlie Chaplin in Le Cirque. These presented a combination of excellent photography, expert cutting, impressive mass action, and bewildering variety and elaborateness of setting, beside which the French films seemed fumbling and povertystricken.

Poverty is, of course, the obvious handicap under which the French film producer has to labour. He has nothing like the financial resources of his American competitor, and cannot afford the actors, the directors, or the sets that we can. But poverty is not nearly all that is the matter with the French producer, his protestations to the contrary. What he does not yet possess, as a class, is film-imagination. Our Hollywood magnates are not—if rumour is to be believed—intellectual supermen, and their taste is not always that of Cosimo dei Medici; but they and their henchmen do at least think in terms of motion pictures, of values rather than colours, of expression rather than intonation, of pantomime rather than speech.

The average French film, on the contrary, is still redolent of the theatre. French plays are still transferred to the screen about as they were written, their insufficiency of film action being remedied, not by devising more action, but by a generous padding of dialogue. The film version of Henri Bataille's La Femme Nue, for instance, abounds in dreary sequences wherein the two leading characters enact whole scenes from the play through the medium of alternate close-ups and lengthy titles. French film acting is generally that of the traditional French stage, combining a formalized extravagance of gesture with a system of elaborate facial gymnastics that are as hard to watch as they must be to perform. After observing a French film comedian convey a subtle nuance by a method that is a cross between a stroke of apoplexy and an epileptic fit one yearns anew for one glimpse of Charlie Chaplin's right eyebrow.

But even expert French motion picture actors—and they exist—could not hope to survive the horrors of French film cutting and arrangement of sequences. I saw a picture in Paris last spring called La Madonne des Sleepings. It was made from a novel by Maurice De Kobra, who seems to be the Michael Arlen of France, and its star was a beautiful and talented actress named Claude France, whose untimely death cut short what would have been a brilliant career. It contained some fine photography and excellent acting, and showed evidences of intelligent direction. I saw it twice, and I do not yet know what it was about. My guess is that the producers had filmed every page of the novel, words and all, and finding that the result aggregated twenty or thirty reels of films, had cut it by the simple process of first omitting every other reel and then removing every other reel of the remainder. All I know of the story is that a young man who didn't need a job got a job as private secretary to an English lady whom he already knew, went off to Russia about some oil wells of hers, was thrown into jail by the Bolsheviks, was rescued by some old Russian pals of his whom I had never seen before, got back to a Scotch castle in time to find his employer about to marry another Russian who had cast off a girl who was the head of the Soviet government and who came back to Scotland to shoot him and the jury called it suicide and so we see our hero seeing our heroine off at a railway station no it can never be you are my dearest friend but that is all and she was called the madonna of the sleeping cars because she spent all of her time travelling and a good job too and so out into the night.

YET despite their frequently disastrous technical handling French films have one quality that ours lack almost completely. That is the quality of having been conceived by adults for the entertainment of adults. In comedies and stories of pure adventure—The Circus and Chang, for instance—our films easily outclass those of the rest of the world; but when it comes to any serious presentation or discussion of life we are, compared with our Continental cousins, childish. Our film sophistication ends with our technique. The average "serious" American picture exhausts the resources of two sciences and half a dozen arts in order to present a tale whose realism and philosphy are a combination of the points of view of Peter Rabbit, the Brothers Grimm, and the late Gene Stratton Porter. In even the worst French films one encounters evidence that, even if they have missed their mark, they have been aimed by grown-up men who had in mind an audience whose mental age was two decades higher than the American nine-year limit.

Continued on page 110

Continued from page 69

La Madonne des Sleepings is, in its entirety, amorphous nonsense, but in its individual scenes it does present characters who think and act like the human beings one knows. One may come away from a French picture, bored and indignant; but one has at least seen an honest bad attempt at a good job, rather than a de luxe edition of Mother Goose. One may quarrel with the philosophy, the motivation, and the psychology of a French film; but there is something to quarrel with. To quarrel with the philosophy of an American film would be like striking a child.

Occasionally a French picture is not only intelligently conceived but adequately filmed. The result is invariably interesting and sometimes thrilling. La Grande Epreuve, the French "Big Parade." is a good example. Another such film it has been my good fortune to see. If you are in Paris this year, go to the Cinema Imperial, where you will probably find a picture called L'Equipage. Miss Harry's New York Bar if you must, but do not miss L'Equipage; for it is not only a superb picture, but a picture that you will never see, unmutilated, in America.

Continued on page 112

Continued from page 110

You will not see it here because its story is immoral. It concerns a young aviator who meets an adorable girl in a Paris brasserie during an air raid, and becomes her lover. Later, at the aviation camp, he makes a friend, an older man whom he comes to love with the devotion of a younger brother. He returns to Paris on leave, bearing a letter which he is to deliver to his friend's wife, forgets it in the joy of seeing his mistress again, goes tardily to deliver it, and discovers that his amie and his comrade's wife are the same girl.

Bewildered and grief-stricken, he returns to the front. The old friendship is spoiled. The boy avoids the man, who, unsuspecting, is puzzled and distressed by his friend's coolness. It is while the two are accomplishing a particularly dangerous flight that the man learns the truth, and blindly turns the plane toward the German trenches, with but one conscious purpose—to get himself killed. A stream of bullets from an enemy plane reminds him that he has no right to sacrifice his friend to his own grief. He turns, beats off his pursuers and regains the camp, desperately wounded, but alive. The boy is dead.

This story outrages not only the morals but the rights of the American movie audience, for besides dealing openly with illicit love it kills off the hero. Yet, seeing the picture, one does not mind, for one has—at last—met in a motion picture a crowd of people who live and think and feel and make love and get drunk and fight and die like human beings; and the experience is so welcome that only later does one realize how infrequent it is. The American motion picture aims at entertainment pure and simple, and succeeds admirably. The French picture fails most of the time; but it fails partly, I believe, because what it aims at is neither pure nor simple, and is something more than entertainment. Good or bad, it possesses the one quality that we lack—sophistication. Americans manufacture the best pictures that the film industry of today has to offer. Once in a while, however, a Frenchman turns out a work of art.