A curious light is thrown on the psychology of picture-house audiences by the fact that only recently has the first screen tragedy been completed. It is a Griffith production called ╥Broken Blossoms,╙ and is founded on Thomas Burke╒s Limehouse story ╥The Chink and the Child.╙ That excellent actress Lilian Gish takes the leading part in it.
The definition of a tragedy is a drama with an unhappy ending. A play or film may be submerged in sorrow right from the beginning and yet if it can manage to raise its head at the last minute it is saved from being designated a tragedy and from consequent unpopularity. Nowadays it is not necessary for a book to end on a note of jubilation, with the Wedding March thumping close by. People like to read novels that mirror life, and in life these summits of ecstasy do not often lead to a ╥Finis.╙ On the stage, too, an unhappy ending is suffered, though not very gladly. The kinema has no place at all for it.
This is the more strange because the kinema, of all forms of entertainment, leaves the most fleeting impression behind it. The finish of a book is not immediately overlapped by the beginning of another; one leaves the theatre after the final curtain drops, and many days may elapse before some other play rubs the stern lines of the tragedy from one╒s memory. yet in the ordinary picture-house programme the main item is wedged between a boisterous farce and the many-hued interest of ╥Current Events.╙ Under such conditions no production, however effective and lovely, can hope to leave unspoiled impressions. But at all costs those impressions, distorted and smudgy and faint must be happy ones.
It is the ending that matters. Tragedy, often very beautiful and poignant, is found in the middle of dozens of popular films. ╥Hearts of the World,╙ the new Fox version of ╥Les Miserables,╙ ╥Cabiria,╙ ╥Maslova,╙ and that gruesome production ╥The Knife,╙ all work through a more or less piercing crescendo of agony. ╥The Honor System,╙ a clever propagandist film dealing with Arizona gaols, has many tragic episodes in it; innumerable society and domestic dramas plunge their characters into deep and bitter waters. But none of these productions is a thoroughgoing tragedy. In the very beginning of each one there is a loophole through which one can see happiness beyond the foreground shadow. Your real tragedy never admits of that. Until ╥Broken Blossoms╙ is shown there is no kinema production of use as illustration, but the stage offers plenty. That ╥Hamlet,╙ for instance. From the first words in that wonderful first scene the most insensitive audience is made away that no glimmer of happiness will be found in the far-away ending. As the play goes on, tragedy after tragedy wraps it round as inevitably as petals round a closing flower, and nothing but a brutal and philistine disregard for nature and art could alter its doomed progress.
Up to the present, the kinema has left ╥Hamlet╙ alone, but the knack of giving sudden upward twists to down-going paths is one of its proudest accomplishments. it made its reputation by its last-minute averting of tragedy. Everyone remembers the old scene where the heroine dashes up in the nick of time to shoot through the rope which is about to suspend the hero by his comely neck to a stout elm tree. Something of the same idea is used in ╥Intolerance,╙ when an automobile reaches the scaffold just as the four executioners raise their knives to sever the cords which, American fashion, work the trap. In gentler stories heart failure or a train accident serves to clear the path of happiness for the deserving; unpardonable sins are forgiven and apparently forgotten; a jury is sentimental; a will is found; artificial respiration revives Ophelia, and Hamlet and she rule Denmark in peace and well-being.
The kinema is perfectly at liberty to insist on cheerful endings if the subject is its own possession. To alter the conclusion of plays or novels adapted for the screen is pure vandalism and impertinence. A flaring example of this was the film version of ╥Justice.╙ In Galsworthy╒s play Falder flings himself down a staircase and is killed: in the film he goes back to prison and eventually sinks to the lowest grade of human life. The emendation is only less subtly tragic and is entirely inartistic. Another sufferer is ╥Hindle Wakes.╙ In no sense is this a tragedy; it ends reasonably and on just the right note of balance and logic. Presumably to make it more popular and less true to life, the kinema brings in a sweetheart for Fanny and the inevitable wedding bells in the distance. The thoroughly bad screen version of Temple Thurston's novel ╥Sally Bishop╙ added the sin of an altered ending to its other transgressions. In the book the heroine commits suicide; the film makes the amount of poison she has swallowed insufficient to kill her, and she is brought to life and married to the hero or villain, according to how one regards that easy-moralled gentleman. It will be very interesting to see with how much favour ╥Broken Blossoms╙ is received. M. A. L.
