LAUGHTER AT WRONG MOMENTS

Hawera Star, Volume LI, 28 May 1932, Page 14

LAUGHTER AT WRONG MOMENTS

JT is the considered opinion, based on experience, of a cinema circuit manager who makes a practice of studying audience reaction to the films shown in his 'theatres that laughter at the wrong moments has lately increased to the point of becoming a menace to serious talkies. Emotional scenes are often greeted with howls of unseemly mirth which completely spoil their effect. Dramas of pathos and thrillers are destroyed by laughter. There must be something wrong with .serious scenes which are greeted with laughter. We know, of course, that there are silly people who laugh at the representation of any feeling of emotion they are mentally unfitted to appreciate. They are responsible for the “laughter in eoirrt” which occurs during real-life murder trials. They are capable of giggling hysterically at almost any emotional situation, and fheir reactions are not worth bothering about. But several recent film scenes have had an equal, though in most cases a different, effect on intelligent audiences. Many filmgoers have said that emotional scenes in recent films made them feel hot and uncomfortable, although they did not laugh at them. They thought that they carried emotionalism beyond the point to which screen drama ought to go. j

Yet American audiences seem to revel in it. The American temperament must have a much greater capacity for assimilating undiluted emotion than the British.

Emotional acting is not, however, the only source of unintentional laughter.

Menace to “ Serious ” Talkies

There are other causes which cannot be excused on the grounds of differences in national temperaments. Too fervent love-making in talkies generally gets a laugh, perhaps because the lover is always something of a dolt to the detached observer, but more likely because directors are fond of exaggerating the none too tender (film) passion in the interests of box-office appeal. The spectacular, lingering embrace with the gigantic close-up of lips meeting lips somehow seenls ludicrous when it is brought into a talkie. The dialogue of love, as interpreted by -scenario writers, is frequently funny. Both must be “toned down” still farther in order to be effective instead of amusing.

Something will have to be done, too, about horror films which try .too hard to be horrible, with the result that they are evidently mistaken for riotous comedies. A section of the Great British Public is astonishing film magnates and critics alike by sitting back and laughing heartily at the blood-curdling thrillers prepared for the express purpose of scaring them out of their wits. They simply refuse to take screen monsters seriously, mainly because Hollywood, in her anxiety to do the thing handsomely, has spelt horror with a capital “H." She has made up her monsters with such painstaking care that they look like gruesome golliwogs. Exaggeration—in various forms—is the fatal fault responsible for the misplaced mirth aroused by so many serious and semi-serious talkies.