quate style the man represents the colony. Sessue Hayakawa should give
us Japanese tales more adapted to the films. We should have stories of
Iyeyasu and Hideyoshi, written from the ground up for the photoplay
theatre. We should have the story of the Forty-seven Ronin, not a
Japanese stage version, but a work from the source-material. We should
have legends of the various clans, picturizations of the code of the
Samurai.

The Typhoon is largely indoors. But the Patriotic Motion Picture is
generally a landscape. This is for deeper reasons than that it requires
large fields in which to manoeuvre armies. Flags are shown for other
causes than that they are the nominal signs of a love of the native land.

In a comedy of the history of a newspaper, the very columns of the
publication are actors, and may be photographed oftener than the human
hero. And in the higher realms this same tendency gives particular power
to the panorama and trappings. It makes the natural and artificial
magnificence more than a narrative, more than a color-scheme, something
other than a drama. In a photoplay by a master, when the American flag is
shown, the thirteen stripes are columns of history and the stars are
headlines. The woods and the templed hills are their printing press,
almost in a literal sense.

Going back to the illustration of the engine, in chapter two, the
non-human thing is a personality, even if it is not beautiful. When it
takes on the ritual of decorative design, this new vitality is made
seductive, and when it is an object of nature, this seductive ritual
becomes a new pantheism. The armies upon the mountains they are defending
are rooted in the soil like trees. They resist invasion with the same
elementary stubbornness with which the oak resists the storm or the cliff
resists the wave.

* * * * *

Let the reader consider Antony and Cleopatra, the Cines film. It was
brought to America from Italy by George Klein. This and several ambitious
spectacles like it are direct violations of the foregoing principles.
True, it glorifies Rome. It is equivalent to waving the Italian above the
Egyptian flag, quite slowly for two hours. From the stage standpoint,
the magnificence is thoroughgoing. Viewed as a circus, the acting is
elephantine in its grandeur. All that is needed is pink lemonade sold in
the audience.

The famous Cabiria, a tale of war between Rome and Carthage, by
D'Annunzio, is a prime ex