Reprinted in conjunction with the screening of The Black Pirate at SFSFF 2024
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. I suppose all successful novels and plays are also designed to please the female sex too. At any rate the overwhelming, apparently meaningless, and immensely conventional love interest in the bulk of films is certainly made for them. Disguise it how they may, practically every film pretends to be “about a man and a woman.” This is true of farces (remember Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, who all have their pretty young women companions), true of big spectacles like The Sea Beast, The Covered Wagon, as well as the plainly amatory picture. Somebody must marry somebody before the piece is through, or must fall into somebody’s arms.
♦ ♦ ♦
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 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 them they’re tired of just nothing but unreal love-stuff, they’d get something else. They certainly would. If one out of ten of them asked for more films like: Abraham Lincoln; Her Sister from Paris; Forbidden Paradise; Pearls and Savages; The Woman of Paris; College Days; The Marriage Circle; The Last Laugh; Don Q; The Black Pirate; Stella Dallas; Skinner’s Dress Suit; The Monkey’s Paw; The Tower of Lies; Vaudeville; The Unholy Three; Nell Gwyn; Dr. Mabuse; Her Big Night—they’d get them.
♦ ♦ ♦
Also, the cinema must develop or die, and it is remarkable that all the best films are the ones with little or no conventional sentiment in them. The best that the enlightened public can do is to boost the non-sentimental, the experimental films, the ones that cause new blood to come into the unwieldy carcase of cinematography. The cinema runs after the public: it does not spring from the public.
♦ ♦ ♦
This is the great strength of the cinema, that it caters for daydreams—surface sentiment, riches, travel, splendour and wild excitement—more thoroughly, more generously, more convincingly than any other known form of entertainment, and offers it in the most effortless way, under the best circumstances, to music, in a twilight solitude, with no mental effort demanded of those for whom it caters.
Howls of dismay are always rending the air in Los Angeles because the public tire of first one thing then another. The howls generally show, not the fickleness of the public, but the density of film producers who are really so stupid that they imagine, if one film about the Argentine is a success, that they are perfectly safe in turning out a dozen more films set in the Argentine, quite forgetting that: (1) it may not have been the setting at all but some other peculiarity of the film which made it enjoyable, and (2) that their Argentine imitations will not necessarily be equally successful, even if the setting was the bonne bouche of the original picture, if stupid stories, particularly improbable Spanish castes, bad continuity, poor psychology and a half-dozen other common faults drown the one merit of colourful scenes. They behave, in fact, like manufacturers who think a trade mark is all that is sufficient to ensure the sale of their goods, and neglect to make their goods saleable.
The public is not fickle. It is the most ridiculously faithful of animals, as every innovator knows. It has, for instance, enjoyed low comedy, universal satires (I mean satires on the foibles of humanity, not those of some clique) and the heart-rending melodrama since, at least, the sixteenth century. And it still likes all these things. But the fact that it may love one low comedy in which a dog steals some sausages does not mean that you have only to show a dog stealing sausages in any low comedy in order for it to be successful. This simple fact eludes the somewhat extraordinary brain of many who make films.
But I wish the public could, in the midst of its pleasures, see how blatantly it is being spoonfed, and ask for slightly better dreams.
Excerpted from Iris Barry’s Let’s Go to the Pictures published in London in 1926.
About Iris Barry
The Spectator’s first movie reviewer who ran with the Bloomsbury crowd in mid-1920s London, Iris Barry did her part in preserving The Black Pirate, having cajoled Douglas Fairbanks along with Mary Pickford, D.W. Griffith, and studio heads like Walt Disney and Samuel Goldwyn into depositing their collections at the film library she’d helped to start at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the early 1930s. She also later convinced the U.S. Secretary of State that archiving European titles had value and then brought over films by F.W. Murnau, Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, G.W. Pabst, and Robert Wiene at a crucial time in history. Her screening series at MoMA helped establish a canon of silent cinema that had ripple effects on American movies. As New Yorker critic Richard Brody observed in 2014: “In the early nineteen-sixties, retrospectives of the films of Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, and Alfred Hitchcock—programmed by Peter Bogdanovich, who was in his early twenties—inspired a new generation of critics and filmmakers.