on the stage--it is a part of its art; as the pigment
is part of that of the painter. We are surrounded by symbols; we are not
surprised that costume, gesture and voice are also symbolic instead of
purely natural. But in the moving picture play it is, or should be,
different. The costume and make-up, the posture and gesture, that seem
appropriate in front of a painted house or tree on a back-drop, become so
out-of-place as to be repulsive when one sees them in front of a real
house and real trees, branches moving in the wind, running water--all the
familiar accompaniments of nature. The movie producers, being unable to
get away from their stage experience, are failing to grasp their
opportunity. Instead of creating a drama of reality to correspond with the
real environment that only the movie can offer, they are abandoning the
unique advantages of that environment, to a large degree. They build fake
cities, they set all their interiors in fake studio rooms, where
everything is imitation; even when they let us see a bit of outdoors, it
is not what it pretends to be. We have all seen, on the screen, bluffs 200
feet high on the coast of Virginia and palm trees growing in the borough
of the Bronx. And they hire stage actors to interpret the stagiest of
stage plots in as stagy a way as they know how. I am taking the movie
seriously because I like it and because I see that I share that liking
with a vast throng of persons with whom it is probably the only thing I
have in common--persons separated from me by differences of training and
education that would seem to make a common ground of any kind well-nigh
impossible. With some persons the fact that the movie is democratic puts
it outside the pale at once. Nothing, in their estimation, is worth
discussing unless appreciation of it is limited to the few. Their attitude
is that of the mother who said to the nurse: "Go and see what baby is
doing, and tell him he musn't." "Let us," they say "find out what people
like, and then try to make them like something else." To such I have
nothing to say. We ought rather, I believe, to find out the kind of thing
that people like and then do our best to see that they get it in the best
quality--that it is used in every way possible to pull them out of the
mud, instead of rubbing their noses further in.

On the other hand, some capable critics, like Mr. Walter Pritchard Eaton,
decry the movies because they are undemocratic--because they are of