HAPPY ENDINGS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 156, 3 July 1937, Page 1 (Supplement)

HAPPY ENDINGS.

IS POPULAR TASTE CHANGING? •A CINEMA EXPERIMENT. t (By CYRANO.) I left 'em all In couples a-kissing'on th« decks. I left the lovers loving and the parents signing cheques. In endless English comfort by country folk caressed. I left the old three-decker at the Islands of the Blest. —Rudyard Kipling. Are the reading and theatre-going publics becoming more tolerant of what may be loosely called the unhappy ending? The question is raised by recent discussions in England and j America arising out of certain films. It j seems that when the film version of James Hilton's remarkable story of philosophical adventure in Tibet, "Lost Horizon," was first filmed, the director ! capitulated to what was considered popular demand, and substituted a conventional romantic fade-out for the author's ending. At the same time, however, he made a second ending, fashioned more closely after the book, and when the film was first shown reviewers' protests were such that the "happy ending" was dropped. The "Christian Science Monitor," which reports this, also says that in "Beloved Enemy" the producers made two endings, one sad and one happy, and allowed the exhibitor to choose which he would show, and from London comes news of a film in which the hero, instead of dying, is kept alive in a revised version, and the public is asked to say whether it approves of the change. Unfortunately I have not seen the name of the film, and cannot, therefore, be eure that it is not "Beloved Enemy." What We Expect. I do not know what people in other countries expect; but most British people look for a happy ending in their stories and plays. There is a large section of the huge novel-reading public that demands such endings. I know a woman who, hefore she takes out a library book, turns to the ending and makes sure it is all right. This is not surprising, because, for one thing, the child is father to the man or the woman, and the child is brought up on happy endings. Cinderella gets her prince; Dick Whittington becomes Lord Mayor of London. Fancy asking a boy to accept a story in which Reginald Anstruther, the handsome young hunter, and Voice-of-Many-Rivers, his Indian guide, are killed and scalped by the treacherous Minnetonkas; it would be a scandalous flouting of the conventions. I reihember well the shock I got as a boy when I found that the hero in—l think —one of Captain Marrvatt's books was killed at the end. I felt it wasn't r playing fair. The feeling persists far j into adult life. I finished that grim

and too-little-known story of Irish life by Edith Somerville and Mertin Roes, "The Real Charlotte," in a tramcar one afternoon, and when I came to the death of the young wife, for whom the reader's sympathies had been so strongly enlisted, I nearly threw the book out of the window in my disappointment and indignation. Marriage Bells and Happiness. Yes, the habit is very strong. We like books to end with marriage bells, and virtue to triumph over vice. As we leave childhood behind, and shades of the prison house begin to close about us, we realise, quietly and graduallyascending to our experience and temperament, that life is not like that, and that while it is not strictly true that, as the Mikado says, virtue is triumphant only in theatrical performances, the righteous do not always prosper. There are the divorce statistics to tell ms that marriage bells are not the last word in the problem of happiness. As wisdom grows "we may ask ourselves whether some of the characters in fiction who go out to their ringing were really happy ever afterwards. Did Agnes prove a really satisfactory wife to David Copperfield? Were Portia and Bassanio always a loving couple? Mr. St. John Ervine had so much doubt about that fortune-hunter that he wrote a sequel to "The Merchant of Venice," in which Bassanio is depicted as a rotter. He mi"ht turn his attention to the married life of Mariana and Angelo in "Measure for Measure." Present-day fiction and drama are deeply concerned with what happens after marriage, so much so, indeed, that we are in danger of going to the other extreme and thinking ot happv marriages as much less common than thev are. Just as news tend* to concern itself with the follies and vices of society, so the' novelist and the dramatist are drawn to incompatibility and conflict; and ignore contentment and happiness because they are undramatic. The Satisfactory Ending. The novelist and the dramatist may study public taste, or they may not. There is nothing new in the changin 0 of an ending to suit that taste Pinero did it in hie first serious play, The 1 flicrate." In the first version his hero committed suicide; in the second lie lived. Popular novelists whose worKs have run serially have been begged by readers not to kill the leading characters —so strong is the hold that imaginary people have upon our affections. Pinero6 case points to the heart of the matter. It really does not matter what happens to the hero in "The Profligate." But it does matter what happens to Paula in "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray." Whether one thinks this a fine play or not, Paula's suicide is the artistic ending— the ending implicit in the play. I notice that a happy ending has been imposed upon a film version of Sean o'Casey's tragi-comedy of Irish life, "The Plough and the Stars" —how I do not know. After this one may expect a wedding to follow the German attack in "Journey's End." Happy or unhappy endings depend upon the nature of the play in the

I novel, and the reader or spectator has a complaint only when the ending is a wrenching of the story or its characters from the course set. One has a right to ■ object to a gratuitous killing of a hero or heroine in the last chapter, just as one has a right to protest against characters caught in coils of fate being rescued at the end merely to please the reader or swell the box office receipts. A London producer says people now want satisfactory endings, not merely happy ones. By satisfactory he would mean endings conforming with the general construction of the work and satisfying to the consumer's conscience and experience of life. Facing Life. It depends, of course, on our objects in reading and going to the theatre, and they are sometimes mixed. We may seek enlargement of experience or escape from life, or both. The headmaster of a great English school recently said that he sought happy endings. Probably this is his means of obtaining relief from his daily duties. It seems to me that there are manv signs that to-day there is a much larger public ready to face unhappy endings, and realistic treatment of themes, than there was a generation or two ago. The end of the nineteenth century was the heyday of the happy ending. Look at our novels and plays to-day—at Aldous Huxley's stories, at the bitterness and disillusionment of Somerset Maugham's and Noel Coward's plays. Numbers of plays have succeeded in England without happy endings. A famous English producer, Mr. Charles Cochran, declares that insistence on the happy ending is dead; people now want, in books, films, 1 plays, an intelligent curtain. The ' "Monitor" sees in recent film develop- ' ments "not only a growing artistic ' consciousness in the American cinema, . but also, perhaps, the public's readiness for something besides adolescent " romantic cliches." This increase in artistic sensibility and courage in facing r life is all to the good so long as it does not make people swing too far the other r way. One might gather from some ] books that everybody was desperately unhappy, or should be. which, surely, j is as false a reading of life as the senti- , inentalist's.