to the photoplay. Here are two bits from his
discourse:--

"Strike the dialogue from Moliere's Tartuffe, and what audience would
bear its mere stage-business? Imagine the scene in which Iago poisons
Othello's mind against Desdemona, conveyed in dumb show. What becomes of
the difference between Shakespeare and Sheridan Knowles in the film? Or
between Shakespeare's Lear and any one else's Lear? No, it seems to me
that all the interest lies in the new opening for the mass of dramatic
talent formerly disabled by incidental deficiencies of one sort or
another that do not matter in the picture-theatre...."

"Failures of the spoken drama may become the stars of the picture palace.
And there are the authors with imagination, visualization and first-rate
verbal gifts who can write novels and epics, but cannot for the life of
them write plays. Well, the film lends itself admirably to the
succession of events proper to narrative and epic, but physically
impracticable on the stage. Paradise Lost would make a far better film
than Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman, though Borkman is a dramatic
masterpiece, and Milton could not write an effective play."

Note in especial what Shaw says about narrative, epic, and Paradise Lost.
He has in mind, no doubt, the pouring hosts of demons and angels. This is
one kind of a Crowd Picture.

There is another sort to be seen where George Beban impersonates The
Italian in a film of that title, by Thomas H. Ince and G. Gardener
Sullivan. The first part, taken ostensibly in Venice, delineates the
festival spirit of the people on the bridges and in gondolas. It gives
out the atmosphere of town-crowd happiness. Then comes the vineyard, the
crowd sentiment of a merry grape-harvest, then the massed emotion of many
people embarking on an Atlantic liner telling good-by to their kindred on
the piers, then the drama of arrival in New York. The wonder of the
steerage people pouring down their proper gangway is contrasted with the
conventional at-home-ness of the first-class passengers above. Then we
behold the seething human cauldron of the East Side, then the jolly
little wedding-dance, then the life of the East Side, from the policeman
to the peanut-man, and including the bar tender, for the crowd is treated
on two separate occasions.

It is hot weather. The mobs of children follow the ice-wagon for chips of
ice. They besiege the fountain-end of the street-sprinkling wagon quite
closely, rejoicing to have th