Talkies Even More Uniform Than Silent Productions--Backstage, College Lead

EDITOR'S NOTE

Richard Watts Jr., the author of the accompanying article, is the movie editor of the New York Herald Tribune. In this capacity he has gained for himself the reputation of being one of the country's leading screen critics. His close connection with the motion picture industry through the recent period of its change from silent to sound production makes him peculiarly suited for the task of tracing the trend of the "talkies".

Mr. Jesse L. Lasky, who is rapidly becoming the prophet, as well as the co-boss of the cinema industry, last week issued another of his incisive and optimistic manifestoes. Determined to be quite judicial about everything, Mr. Lasky confessed that, in the quaint old days of the silent films, the screen producers were inclined to be a bit imitative. A successful underworld film meant a lengthy series of cops-and-robbers melodramas, and, one popular, mystery play would bring about a brood of sleuth narratives. Now, he proclaimed, the period of such foolishness has ended and the coming of the talking picture means the era of freshness and individuality in film making.

Whereupon no less than three hundred consecutive dramas with a backstage setting have been produced. The screen critics who are betting men make a comfortable living offering eight to five that each new picture they are forced to attend will deal with the adventures of a song-and-dance team, in which the man is a lovable, but worthless, drunkard and the woman a noble creature who makes sacrifices for him. Occasionally, of course, these gamblers happen to be wrong. Then the photoplay turns out to be a merry narrative of college life, in which the students take excellent courses in tap dances and the hero, who has played listlessly in the first half of the big game because his sweetheart seems untrue to him, discovers that she is the flower of fidelity and goes ninety-five yards for a touchdown in the last ten seconds of play, just to celebrate her loyalty.

It is, of course, simple enough to make fun of the cinema magnates for their insistence on backstage and pseudo-collegiate subject matter, but it is totally unfair not to realize that there is much to be said on their side. The filmgoers have demonstrated with some conclusiveness that they want frequent musical numbers in their pictures, yet with equal certainty they have shown that they want the songs to be embedded in the plot with some show of realism. A stage musical comedy can interrupt the story with a song cue and introduce, with no apologies at all, tenors, sopranos and dancing choruses. The screen fans, however, insist that the story provide some excuse for the introduction that is inherent in the narrative. Naturally backstage stories, where sections of a musical comedy can be realistically shown as part of the atmosphere, supply the most likely field for what the paying guests demand.

It is true, though, that three recent pictures in which the musical numbers have been added, in the stage, rather than-the screen, manner have proved reasonably successful. They are "Rio Rita," "The Hollywood Revue" and "The Cocoanuts," but in each case there has been an explanation that prevents destruction of the aforementioned theory. "Rio Rita" is frankly a photograph of a famous Ziegfeld success and it has proved popular for the reason that it provides at small cost an opportunity for the general populace to see the work of a nationally publicized showman. "The Hollywood Revue" could hardly fail since almost every star of one of the largest film firms makes a sort of personal appearance in it, and "The Cocoanuts" has been liked where the Marx Brothers are known and the defects of production are therefore generously overlooked.

On the whole, however, it has been the more naturally cinematic films with music that have been successful. "The Dance of Life," which is the screen edition of the play "Burlesque," is typical of this school and really set the model for it. The vogue has been so successful that such wildly inferior pictures as "Broadway Scandals," "Jazz Heaven," and "The Song of Love," while far from smash hits, seem likely to show a profit merely because they meet that popular demand for song and dance with a touch of the Laugh, Mrs. Clown, Laugh manner.

Then there is the college-musical or "Good News" type of film, of which "Sweetie"--where the action, as a matter of fact, takes place in a prep school, though the films have little interest in the difference--is considerably the best. In it the songs are introduced by making the hero an embryonic song writer and the heroine a chorus girl who inherited the school, and by letting the students sing and dance all over the place at social functions, at the Big Game and while Miss Helen Kane is supposed to be taking a music lesson. You can see that the audiences make no demand for any super-ingenuity in the plotting of the musical interludes.

The chief reason that "Sweetie" is superior to the average of its school is that it dares for a moment or so to indulge in just a trace of satire. There is for example the episode when Mr. Jack Oakie, as a hoofer turned freshman, discovers that the Alma Mater song of his school is too dirge-like for his taste. There upon he writes a jazz version of his own, which he calls "Alma Mammy" and sings in his best Jolson manner before the assembled students. Even the football game is not taken too seriously for instance the dumb and lethargic Swedish tackle becomes the hero of the battle because his sweetheart playfully pots him with her air rifle just before the ball is passed, thus opening him to tear great holes in the opposing line.

The popular screen musical comedy called "Sunny Side Up," which thanks to the engaging presence of Miss Jane Gaynor and several effective DeSylva-Brown-Henderson tunnes is Among the current Broadway successes introduces as many withouit recourse to backstage or college What pases for its plot includes episoedes at a block party in New York's East Side and a charity show at Southampton and the principals and choruses can indulge themselves in song and dance for all they are worth at both affairs.

The most unfortunate effect of the demand for musical interpolations is to be found in "The Great Gabbo" in which Erich von Stroheim is starred. Here was a striking and original dramatic idea about an arrogant ventriloquist who could only be human when talking through the mouth of his dummy and finally became so jealous of the little figure that he broke it and felt himself a murderer. Since the story belonged legitimately enough backstage there had to be a series of chorus numbers, with the result that the drama was entirely submerged. Most screen plots, of course, are not worth much to a shot.