TO BE CONTINUED

Southland Times, Issue 21419, 13 June 1931, Page 11

TO BE CONTINUED

“OR NOT TO BE . .

(By

“Essea.”)

I am growing old or should I say older ? Any doubts I may have had on that score have now gone, taken their departure, faded into oblivion, done everything usually associated with abrupt leave-takings. And why? No, there are yet no silver threads among my gold, no falling hairs on my coat shoulders, no loss of admiration of the fair sex. In short, no outward signs of gradual decrepitude. I hen why? I rather like the use of two word questions. Ido believe that Addison, Bacon and “Q.R.S.” use similar word constructions to gain emphasis. Idoit to gain extra lines in a column story. But that's entirely by the way. How I found out I had grown old (or older) came as the result of a visit to the pictures the other afternoon. In other words, a matinee. Matinee, in case you don’t know, is derived from the French 'matin’ and means —but I see you are not interested so I’ll proceed. Well, a matinee always means one thing—children. It’s their day, really, and aduits shouldn’t trea pass. But I’m not going to complain about the children at the theatre. Bless their little hearts, no. I'm not going to complain about anything. If I did want to do so, I should merely draw attention to the difficulty in following the dialogue in a talkie when there is a slight undercurrent of noise in the theatre—the bouncing up and down on the seats of the boys and girls, their childish prattle and unrestrained enthusiasm, shrieks of mirth at some humorous situations and boos and hisses upon the approach of the villain, the rustling of lollie papers, the bursting of bags to commemorate tender lip exchanges betwixt hero and heroine, the dropping of pennies and aniseed balls on the floor, the loud blowing of noses and continued tramping up and down the aisles.

No, I’m not complaining (ten per cent, cut, of course, excepted). I’m just coining to the point. Serials. That’s what 1 want to talk about. Mind you, 1 am not going to complain about serials. I just want to explain to you how I knew I had grown old (or older) on the occasion of the memorable day I saw the modern serial. Now when I was a very little boy about the time of the war (Crimean or Boer, I’m not saying) I was very fond of picture shows, especially matinees. Dressed in a little velvet suit with white buttons on the trouser legs and a lace collar around the neck, a bag of lollies in one sticky hand and a shining threepence in the other, off I would go to the old Lyceum, the Albion or the ‘Pops” whenever a matinee was on. I’m not too sure about the description I have given of the clothes I wore but a recent glance through somebody’s family album (yes, they still exist) revealed that such clothes were popular in those days, so why spoil a good ' story ? Well, to me the most important feature of the programme was the serial and, believe me, serials in those days were serials. Titles, actors and actresses are obscured with the passing of the years but I can recall with much satisfaction “The Broken Coin,” in which Francis X. Bushman and Lucille Love were the stars, “Gloria’s Romance,” featuring Miss Billy Burke, “The Iron Claw,” with Sheldon Lewis in the title role, “The Million Dollar Mystery,” with Miss Florence la Badie as heroine, and “The Mysteries of Myra” whose principals I cannot recollect. Now in those days I may have been young and enthusiastic and inclined to be swept off my feet by the shadowy people of the screen, but the fact remains that I received 100 per cent, enjoyment from the serials in which they loved and hated, lived and died. Certainly, they uttered no sound and portrayed their various parts to the accompaniment of only a piano, but as the person at the keyboard knew exactly when to introduce a “Moonlight and Roses” touch to coincide with the sentimental passages and then to dash off into the bass at a hint of impending danger to play those tiddleybits guaranteed to stir even the most blase theatregoer, everything in the garden was lovely and the shortcoming of silence -was more than amply made up for. Serials in those days were thrilling and not improbable, and when the afternoon's performance flickered out showing the heroine, bound, gagged and helpless, lying on a railway line with a top-hatted, ridingtrousered, black-moustached and -hearted villain dashing away to leave her to her fate “to be continued next week,” I could hardly bear the suspense of the intervening few days. In some vague way I knew that she must be saved. Heroines don’t die like that. They never seem to die at all, just live happily ever afterwards. It would be as much as a picture producer’s life would be worth to film a picture in which the heroine died, but that never occurred to me. Neither did the possibility that the railway, like the Wyndham—Glenham branch line, was bare of traffic and that the worst which could befall the heroine was pneumonia from exposure. No, the villain would always choose a line five minutes before the “Limited” was due and there would invariably be glimpses of a huge express train pounding over the tracks, remorselessly, indefatigably, with occasional close-ups of the rapidly-revolving wheels and jets of steam, and the smoke-grimed face of the engineer with his hand on the carburetter or whatever it is. All the week I would worry how it would be possible to extricate the heroine from her terrible predicament and would be back early the following Saturday to see how it was done. Of course, the hero came to the rescue. After a gruelling solo ride on a tandem across the prairies, he arrived on the scene breathless just as the conning-tower of the engine appeared behind a canvas hill Tearing his celluloid collar from his neck and setting fire to it with his last match, the hero flagged the train and it pulled up dead, exactly two and a-quarter inches from the swooning heroine. Or else, he dashed along to the gear lever or whatever it is and detracked the train, sending it hurtling off to Chicago instead of Buenos Aires. What matter how he did it, the fact remained he saved the heroine and caused the villain to gnaw his moustaches behind an adjoining cactus. The suspense, however, would be ended only to come back again at the conclusion of the reel when once again the heroine fell in the clutches of the villain and became a subject for him to try his Boy Scout knots on. Either death from a sputtering bomb or whizzing circular saw, or dishonour! And every Saturday I would be back to make quite sure the hero got his lady love out of this predicament just as he had done in the past and just as he will do as long as serials and heroines exist. I was always glad to see him save her and was not morbid enough then to hope that he would be late just to allow me to see what bits of a heroine looked like scattered over the landscape after the bomb burst or the saw sawed.

Now, things are all changed. The serial I saw recently was in one respect a vast

improvement on those of the past and with the development of incidental noises I was looking forward to hear with unrestrained delight the sound of a villain gnashing his teeth and making more work for dentists in these allegedly hard times. But however excellent the sound portion of the film, it was entirely overlooked in the view of the appalling weakness' of the plot. It was so weak that it actually staggered and the principals blushed every time they faced the audience and played their parts. I will not go into details except to say that I felt despondent for the future of serials, more so in view of the fact I heard a neighbour in the same row of seats declare hoarsely “it was a shame to take the money.” He knew, as well as I, that villains never did what the villain did in this particular picture. It was so absurd, grotesque, that I had to laugh. Villains have progressed with the years and no longer clad in weird, somb e clothes, creep stealthily here and there. Nowadays you cannot distinguish them from Presbyterian ministers. I reiterate I am growing old (or older). I will have to leave serials alone to youthful R the Esses who seem to enjoy them as much as ever I did. And as far as serials and I are concerned, it is not a case of “to be continued next week.” It is THE END.