THE CINEMA.
A FILM OF THE AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE.
THE English film-censor has banned Mr. D. W. Griffith's last picture, Love and Sacrifice. As there was never any question of the film's being indecorous, and because it was about the War of American Independence, an unpleasant rumour arose, before anyone but the censor had seen it in this country, that Mr. Griffith had displayed anti-British feeling. To clear himself, he showed the picture to the Press, who have unitedly denied that the film is in any sense anti-British. The public, which will never see Love and Sacrifice unless the censor's decision is reconsidered, will not believe evil of Mr. Griffith in any case, since they are familiar with his past work ; but an unfortunate impression is likely to be caused by the censor's action, with much graver consequences, in the States. Such a hint of prejudice on our part will do no good.
The film itself is ordinary, and shows hardly any trace of the largeness and sensitiveness of vision that made The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance the two finest American films produced in ten years. It cannot be expected that Mr. Griffith will produce only masterpieces. The story is a simple one of the love of a girl, whose father is a fierce loyalist, for one of the rebels. The most effective scene shows the body of her brother, who fell in the American ranks, brought in to the sickbed of the old father, who believes that his boy died for the British flag. It is typical of Mr. Griffith that he so noticeably wishes his audience to sympathize with the individuals on both sides. The actual war is reproduced neither very artistically, nor stirringly, nor completely, chiefly because too much stress has been laid on the villainy of General Butler, the renegade American who, bringing Mohawk allies to the British side, did frightful things in the name of authority. Mr. Griffith admitted the other day that he could have made a much better picture if he had chosen the English Cunningham as his villain. Perhaps the truth is that there should have been no set villain at all, more actual warfare and, by contrast, more simple human griefs and perplexities. As it is, the film is neither a chronicle picture, nor is it a satisfactory romance. Least of all is it an anti-British treatment of the war. Monsieur Beaucaire, Valentino's sumptuous costume-picture at the London Pavilion, might by a fanatic be judged anti-British, since all the envious snobs and mercenary coquettes in it are English. But Mr. Griffith has patently tried to be kind to us in Love and Sacrifice. I do not remember any English historian who has been so gentle.
Every frequenter of cinemas is well aware of the film- censor's attitude to impropriety, and many must have wished he would now and then discourage the symbolical suggestive- ness of bedroom-doors and shattered lilies more forcibly. But his decisions on political grounds are harder to deduce. There are three possible reasons why it may have been thought this film should not be shown. It cannot be because of the subject, for quite recently a serial on the same theme, called, I think, The Story of Daniel Boone, was permitted. The Board of Censors may, however, have considered that, at the moment, it is impolitic to pass films showing any revolt of citizens against a standing army. But if so, why did they pass Scaramouche and many another film of the French Revolution showing the same rising of the people against oppression ? Or, again, Love and Sacrifice—not because of anything in the picture, for Mr. Griffith has been very reticent about George M.'s influence—might have been thought anti- monarchical in tendency. Yet Beau Brummell, John Barry- more's delightful new picture, was not .refused a licence, although it depicts George IV. in anything but an. honourable light. A third imaginable objection to the picture is its insistence on the horrors of war—perhaps the censor thinks we ought not to be reminded, to be horrified. That, of course, is a matter of opinion ; many people will be inclined to feel with the producer and Mr. Ramsay MacDonald that no effort to prevent a repetition of the calamities of 1914-18 should be spared. Also, the British film, Reveille, which will be released on Armistice Day this year, is a far more bitter reminder of the futility of war, and that film has been passed for exhibition.
Love and Sacrifice has been considerably modified since the censor saw it : even certain of Chatham's words have been deleted from a sub-title for fear they should constitute an offence in the eyes of Chatham's countrymen. I myself hope that the censor will agree to see the picture through again, and that it will be possible for his original decision to be altered. Though one's sympathy with Mr. Griffith is considerable, it is to him and to the world of the cinema generally, in his own words, " a very little thing whether Love and Sacrifice be shown in Great Britain or not." His reputation is secure enough ; he is the best known of all producers in Europe and America ; it is fully admitted that he in the recent past has valuably developed the film, in his own panoramic and emotional manner, as Lubitsch is developing it dramatically and intellectually to-day. If this picture cannot be shown here, the millions of friends and admirers his earlier pictures have made him in England will only receive the more gladly his next production, The Dawn, now in the making from a story by Mr. Geoffrey Moss.
But it is emphatically not a little thing that we should give to America, where the film has already been seen every- where, the impression that we—above all now, when so much in the future depends on our sympathetic relations with that country—are afraid to exhibit this or any other friendly film in England. And if we cannot allow a descendant of the colonists whom Chatham defended to repeat on the screen his words : " No Taxation without Representation," might the censor himself not, in the modified version of the film, suggest the insertion of the Great Commoner's graver plea : " You must respect her (America's) fears and her resentments " ? And could he not then, for such a con- sideration, pass it for public exhibition ?
IRIS BARRY.
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