Let's Go to the Movies |
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acting actors actress æsthetic American films artist beauty best films better camera character Charlie Chaplin cinema cinema audience cinematography colour comedian comedy convention course critics D. W. Griffith director Dorothy Gish dramatic dreams Emil Jannings emotions England English film fact Fairbanks Famous Players farces feel Film Company Forbidden Paradise Fritz Lang funny German films gestures girl Gish give Gold Rush Harold Lloyd hero heroine imagination intelligent Keaton kind lady Last Laugh London look Lubitsch Mabel Normand Marriage Circle Mary Pickford mean melodrama merely Metro-Goldwyn moral moving picture never nice Niebelungs Norma Talmadge person photographs pictorial play Pola Negri popular producers Reginald Denny rôle scene screen seen sense silly stage Stella Dallas story Stroheim studio sub-title successful talent Talmadge theatre thing true villain Warning Shadows Woman of Paris women words young
Popular passages
Page 231 - Barry, looking back in 1926, was exasperated by a regular directorial failing: the one, common in England, of using the screen as though it were a stage with exits left and right, the actors free to move only across a circumscribed oblong area, with a low skyline and the movements all parallel to the plane of the screen, not, as they should be, for the sake of depth-illusion, at angles to it.
Page 229 - This film, made at a negligible cost by an enterprising group of Hollywood unemployed, came in for some curious treatment at the hands of the critics. Iris Barry in her disappointing book, Let's Go to the Pictures, speaks of it as follows: — "Chaplin, one heard, hailed the picture as a masterpiece. When Chaplin opens his mouth, all the critics yap in unison. The Salvation Hunters was acclaimed throughout the world. It was a dismal failure. When it had gone its rounds, Chaplin said that he had thought...
Page 57 - Now one thing never to be lost sight of in considering the cinema is that it exists for the purpose of pleasing women. Three out of every four of all cinema audiences are women.
Page 51 - It is not intended to edify, it is not designed to instruct, or move, or thrill. It is primarily a something to banish care, even reflection, even consciousness. The cinema is a drug.
Page 202 - The scenario and script of the film was incomparably above even Famous Lasky's average. Though the Famous Lasky touch was evident in the gleaming interiors of palaces, in the photography, and in the general finish of the film. But in the hands of Lubitsch the acting of Pola Negri, Rod la Rocque and Adolphe Menjou was so dazzlingly above, not merely the level of these three sound performers, but so much above the level of all but about ten pictures ever played; the story was told so directly pictorially...
Page 64 - It is all very well to lull oneself from the age of sixteen to sixty with " sweet love stories," but do we act up to them ? No, we don't. We might as well, then, do something about persuading the film producers not to drop treacle into our mouths any more. It is bad for us. If one out of ten of all the women who go to the movies here and in America would write a nice little letter to the manager of their pet cinema and tell him they're tired of just nothing but unreal love-stuff, they'd get something...
Page 174 - They would be women rather than men because : (a) women are more visuallyminded on the whole, and (£) because the cinema is more for women than men. They would be persons of education, not necessarily with any kinds of diplomas or degrees, but persons such as now swarm the journalist and art sections of the community — lively-minded, curious, inventive creatures ; above all able to project a story in pictures in their own imagination, and to transfer it to paper by means of very non-literary words,...
Page 64 - ... business. But it is soothing syrup, not reality, all the same. What if we all do (the women) wish we were the heroine in The Blue Lagoon or the heroine in any magazine story, or the heroine in any musical comedy? We jolly well know we aren't and sometimes we recognize that if we were we wouldn't like it. Do women usually marry the first young man they meet under suitable circumstances? No, they don't, and they tend to do so less every year. They look around. It is all very well to lull oneself...
Page 233 - ... Articles and Shorter Writings 60 BARRY, IRIS. Let's Go to the Movies. London: Chatto & Windus, pp. 235-236. A paragraph under the heading, "a note on some clever young men," and a still from The Lodger, "a brillant English film." "The Pleasure Garden . . . had an adult air, was often gracious to the eyes. His second, The Lodger, was a positive shock so unlike anything else it proved . . . excellent, stimulating, evocative of the imagination.
Page 161 - ... While it may be true that many able scripts are done by screen writers, nevertheless the prestige of the screen writer is often so slight that it is doubtful if persons will be willing to train themselves adequately for this instead of aspiring to success in writing novels or dramas. Iris Barry says : I have come lately, however, to feel that established writers of fiction and plays are too much wedded to their own medium to be successful in adapting themselves to writing for the films. The best...