THE more the conventions of movie ideas and technique petrify, the more tempting buffoonery becomes as an antidote. The conventions in painting which drove the Dadaists to their burlesque were as nothing compared to the conventions the movies have built up. For the first Hollywood film Dadaist I have a few suggestions. For instance, I have always thought that the best way to film a famous novel would be to let the audience read it word for word off the screen; at the end of each chapter a list of suitable questions could be asked to see if the audience was getting it. My suggestion for the most worthwhile newsreel would be one that ran for three hours and consisted solely of horse races—the newsreel people could thus see for themselves how alike one horse race is to another and perhaps see so many of them as to get their fill once and for all.
As an antidote to the Bogart and Cooper pictures, a picture should be made in which all the people who were beaten up by Bogart or defeated by Cooper were given a chance to say why they made such a bad showing. My favorite thirty-second movie would open on an idyllic forest glade, with the faithful little boy—played by Roddy McDowall—nuzzling and petting a gentle collie dog, named Lassie: suddenly the dog would turn on Roddy and bite his head off, and the last scene would show Lassie as she was at the start but Roddy would be without a head. And then there would be an Orson Welles movie in which the camera mucked around on a dark stairway for two hours looking for Welles. I’d like to see a movie in which one never saw the faces of the players, and the idea would be that those people in the audience who could identify the actors from their bodies would be given free tickets to next week’s show, in which only the legs of the players were shown; whoever could name the actors this time would be given tickets to a final performance where nothing was shown, and those who could name the actors this time would be made lifelong members of those actors’ fan clubs.
Just a little nonsense has gone a long way lately toward making hash of some of Hollywood’s pet conventions. Much was mentioned in “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek” that was supposedly unmentionable in movies. A good deal of the value of Sturges’ films in general has to do with his kidding of the more precious film conventions, and with his kicking over a few technical clichés now and then. For instance, his starting his movies from the moment the credits start has got rid of the bore of slugging through endless credits and of listening to the terrible music that is played for them. The Bugs Bunny cartoons have got a good amount of humor out of letting the rabbit manipulate the working of the film to suit his convenience, by making asides to the audience and by relaxing the seriousness of the film everywhere. Paramount News has rejuvenated a couple of its recent reels by playing around with the cutting and editing of an Australian rodeo, and using Zero Mostel for its story on the income tax.
The injection of more nonsense into the movies would no doubt lead to playing up many of the great Hollywood exaggerations by a process of worse exaggeration. The tears would well up in such torrents out of actors’ eyes as to cut gorges in their faces; actors would put so little food on their forks when they ate in films that by the last reel they would have shrunk away to skeletons; they would write so fast when there was a need to write in a picture that they would finally be able to wave their hand at the sheet of paper and a five-page, closely packed letter would be the result; a new cigarette, suitable for only one puff, would be discovered; the reshaping of lips would push past the nose and eventually do away with the need for false eyelashes, and the rise in breasts would do away with the need for faces. No male actor over Dickie Moore’s present age would ever be seen without his trenchcoat, and there would be trenchcoats made that intertwined so complicatedly that no man could ever be taken alive out of one. There would be movies in which the music was kept at the same deafening pitch it has when the credits are being shown, so that not a word of what any one was saying would be heard throughout the entire film.
Theatre owners and the movie public would undoubtedly take their cue from this Dadaist phase of movie making. Theatre owners would provide each seat with a noisemaker so that the audience would make some real noise; the spaces between each row of chairs would be done away with entirely so that there would be no chance of your walking to your seat. A way would be found to run four movies simultaneously and spectators would be imported from Central America to make the wait for seats a day or two longer. The public would retaliate just as playfully by merely going to the theatre to buy their candy, then going home to eat it.
April 17, 1944