HAPPY ENDINGS.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVI, Issue 13, 29 December 1925, Page 4

HAPPY ENDINGS.

NOTHING SACRED IN FILM STORIES. Nothing is sacred to the film, complains the “Dailv Telegraph.” Somebody has made a film of “East Lynne” in which Little Willie does not die. {Somebody is going to put on the stage an “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” which ends happily. In this year of grace we do not claim any devout reverence for those two masterpieces. They thought “Ea'st Lynne” a great work of art in the ’sixties, and the Prince of Wales, it is on record, put his suite and Dean Stanley through an examina- , tion in it. But no Prince of Wales will ever do the like again, and even as we write a horrid doubt steals into the mind whether the poor, erring heroine was Lady Isabel or Lady something else. But one cardinal fact remains more enduring than brass. There was a Little Willie, and he died. The thing is proverbial, a piece of folklore. We have seen the stage make a parody of it. and what oup English tneatre ventures to joke about must be familiar indeed. So with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” That was a book once more momentous than /‘East Lynne.” It did make tho flesh creep. But the rising generation do not road it, and we, to whose youth it brought shudders, are innocent of any desire to road it again, nor do wc propose to remember any more of it tnan we can help. Yet wo are clearly of opinion that Uncle Toni died. Vague memories suggest that everybody else died too, but that may bo an exaggeration. The general tone of the book, it must be agreed, is very hostile to a happy ending. Why should the stage want to lot them all live happily evty after? 'Chore is no reason in these devices. Little Viillie and Uncle Tom were made for people who thought it good for themselves to cry. They have no other reason for existence. To expect anyone to be cheerful about them is to ask the impossible. To preserve the lives of people obviously constructed for pathetic or horird deaths is not the way to make the stage or screen brighter. A happy Little Willie must be as tedious as a sentimental Robinson Crusoe.