DAY BY DAY.

Waikato Times, Volume 98, Issue 16174, 27 December 1924, Page 4

DAY BY DAY.

. * Mr Alec Waugh, writing in the Fortnightly Review, 1 on

The Film and The Future.

"The Film and the Future," says: "The film is admittedly a perishable medium.

But the plays of Shakespeare have outlasted the actors tliey were written for and the stage on which they were for the first time set. The actor is the servant of the play: he is (he impermanent and fleeting pathway by which the essence of an eternal quality is borne to us. Of the scenario as of the play. That scenario that presents

perfectly a perfectly told story will be handed as an heirloom down the centuries. And it will come, that ideal scenario, a scenario that is worthy of Rex Ingram, of Lasky, of D. W. Griffith and Cecil Hep worth. We have . four or five great producers; we have in Barbara La Marr, in Edna Purviance, in Eileen Dennis, in Alice Terry and in Enid Bennett five great actresses; in

Henry Edwardcs, in Rudolph Valentino and in Lewis Stone three big actors; but we have no great scenario writer. And the actor and producer can do no more than make the best of the material that is there. We shall get a film that is a work of art when,- and only when, a man of genius who is something of a novelist, something of a dramatist, something also of a painter, a man who sees pictorially, in pictures and not in words, the action and drama of the world, shall express, as he will express, in the film his attitude and his reaction to life. It may be that Charlie Chaplin is that man.

We should not be moved now as we were fifteen years- ago at Drury Lane by the sensationalism of 'The Whip.' That a motor car should dash across the stage and collapse against a bridge; that a man should crawl along the footboard of an express train and uncouple a horse-box; that" the Two Thousand Guineas should be run actually before one's eyes—what would that be to us who have watched Lillian Gish floating on an ice-block down the rapids of Niagara, who have trembled while Harold Lloyd clung with fingers of one hand to the sill of an eighteenstorey window in a New York skyscraper, to us who have seen the sack of Rome. Never again shall we go to the stage for sensational effects of scenery and lighting, for effects than can ba exit better and less expen- .

sively elsewhere. To-day when we do go to the theatre we go there for drama simply. Within a few years' time the drama should have been set free to cultivate what is strictly its own garden."