Horses, Dancers & Dolls

One cinema critic who can also lay claim to being a first-class moviemaker is a blue-eyed, Milquetoast-mustached Scot named John Grierson. At 48, John Grierson might well call himself the father of the documentary. A minor proof of paternity: he was the first to call the fact film a "documentary." As a documentary-maker for the British Government (1927-39), he trained most of that country's current crop of experts. During the war, he bossed Canada's wartime National Film Board and turned out the excellent series of shorts called World in Action and Canada Carries On.

Last week Grierson was in Paris speaking for British culture at UNESCO meetings. He was also organizing a new U.S.British-Canadian company called The World Today, Inc., which plans to make 26 "international" fact films a year. Without much prospect of getting any fresh movie criticism out of such a busy executive, Grierson fans were poring over a collection of his old, still-fresh work recently published in England as Grierson on Documentary, edited by Forsyth Hardy (Collins, 16s.). When the book comes out in the U.S. next spring, it rates a more apt title. Actually, the collection is Grierson on practically everything cinematic. Samples:*

See It at the Crystal. Because he can never find his way in the big cinemansions, "idiotic labyrinth of premieres, first runs," etc., Grierson prefers his neighborhood Crystal. ". . . By the time a film gets to the Crystal, the spit & polish have gone, the confidence trick of presentation and ballyhoo is an old damp squib of months ago, and Lost Horizon, Mr. Deeds, and the Hoot Gibsons, they all come even at last on the billboards. They have to talk across the hard floors and waste spaces of the peanuts to be good, with nothing to warm them except what is inside themselves, and that is as it should be. The Crystal is the place to pick the classics all right. . . ."

Laugh, Clown, Laugh. "It is ... the particular function of comedy to destroy the more trifling dignities of this earth: quality varies with the shape and size of the dignities it destroys. Pantomime goes with a whack to the seat of the pants; slapstick goes with peel or pie to any section of the anatomy which presents itself; Shaw, a Mack Sennett of the Parlour, trips up the prejudices. The quality deepens till, in Swift, you tumble up the human race itself. . . .

"Clowns are the world's incompetents. They are bound to the wheel of incompetence or they cease to be clowns. Chaplin once, in The Gold Rush, broke the underlying significance of his role and spoiled a great film. He forgot Chariot the outcast to become a millionaire and marry the girl, like any John Gilbert or Ronald Colman. Clowns cannot possibly stoop to such romance. They are, in essence, super realists . . . tragedians in disguise. Their endings are happy for everyone but themselves. . . ."

Look' through the Wall. "Cecil B. DeMille is out of fashion among the critics. But ... I have seen The Sign of the Cross twice over and am still an unrepentant admirer. There is no director to touch him in command of the medium: certainly none who strikes such awe into my professional mind . . . [with] his crowds and continuities, yes, and images too. ... How good and fine an artist he is may possibly be another matter. . . . I like both his bathtubs and his debauches, for the sufficient (I hope technical) reason that they are the biggest and the best in cinema. No man short of a Napoleon of movie would dare them, and DeMille is almost casual in their making. . . .

"Robert [Nanook of the North] Flaherty's cinema is as far removed from the theatrical tradition as it can possibly be. His screen is not a stage to which the action of a story is brought, but rather a magical opening in the theater wall, through which one may look out to the wide world: overseeing and overhearing the intimate things of common life which only the camera and microphone of the film artist can reveal. . . ."

Hollywood's Eyes. "As for the big films, the last thing in the world I would ask of them is that they should all be socially significant. They would be a colossal bore if they were. One can, however, reasonably ask that they should . . . reflect something of the reality of our time. ... I doubt if the individual destiny is quite so important and the public destiny quite so unimportant as Hollywood would make them appear. . . .

"It is clear that [the editor] wanted this to be a serious book and myself a pretty serious character. . . . Among the best things for me in film have been the clowns and the comedians, the dancers, the horses, the poets and the dolls. By the witness of these pages I might never have delighted in W. C. Fields and Fred Astaire nor fallen in love . . . with the great Miss West. The documentary group would not have gone very far if it had been all for public observation and reform and not started with an affection for the living quicksilver of the medium itself."

*Quoted by permission of Harcourt, Brace.

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