THE DRAMATIC MIRROR

New York City, New York, U.S.A.

4 August 1917

(page 14)

ACTRESS TAKES EXCEPTION TO CRITICISM OF MOVIES.

MADGE KENNEDY PROTESTS AGAINST THE JUDGING

OF A NEW ACT BY STANDARDS OF AN OLD ONE.

In answer to Aleister Crowley’s plaint [What's Wrong with the Movies?] in the current issue of a magazine that it is “bad taste—and not the world war—which is killing movies,” Madge Kennedy, star of Goldwyn Pictures, observes:

“Mr. Crowley begins with error by the assumption that motion pictures are being ‘killed’ when as a matter of fact, they never were more prosperous. Even in England at grips with the central powers the industry attained a hitherto unexampled vogue.

“The trouble with Mr. Crowley and other critics who persist in seeking the worst there is in motion pictures, is that they judge a new art, the silent drama, by the standards of an old one, the spoken drama. They employ the sum of all dramatic tradition to criticize that which has not yet reached its Elizabethan period. If critics had had as little patience with the crudities of the stage in Shakespeare’s day as they seem to enjoy displaying towards a profession that is newer by several hundreds of years than the drama was in the fifteenth century, there would have been no Greens, Molieres, or Sheridans.

“The motion picture has been feeling its way and the best evidence that it is inherently strong is offered by the fact that it has endured and expanded in spite of its early solecisms. Its adolescent life may be likened to the most colorful of our popular fiction. Yet even President Wilson admits a chronic weakness for dime detective stories.

“But the time has come for critics to acquaint themselves with the fact that the old-fashioned methods of picture making are being replaced by the new. The Goldwyn Pictures Corporation is just one of half a dozen organizations which are making every effort for realism. To complain of art direction when one company alone has under contract to ‘clothe’ its production such as Everett Shinn, Hugo Ballin, Elizabeth Averell, Mrs. Frank W. Alexander, Herbert Messmore and William H. Cotton—as the Goldwyn Company has—is to make the sweeping assertion that all American ornamentation is fundamentally in error. To chide the drawing room etiquette of nationally known American actors and actresses is to say there are no manners in America. To challenge the dramatic structure of the reputable scenarios is to say that trained screen writers do not know their business.

 “The spoken drama of today is not gauged by the plays that fail. The silent drama should be accorded the same privilege and be judged by its notable successes, of which there are many.”