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Close Up (1930) - Twenty-Three Talkies

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TWENTY-THREE TALKIES

Then there were crook films, William Powell films, play films, and then the first musical, Broadway Melody. Shall I ever forget it? Ever forget Anita Page, and Bessie Love's sob out of a blank screen ? Let's try, and hurry on to Movietone Follies, which I dealt with all by itself some months back, and need not do again, save point out that sound and visual imagery were blended for the first time and that the camera was allowed to move around and make its own patterns while the sound, in this case of a song being sung, was quite straight. This came first, you see; it did not occur to people to do anything with sound but use it straight. Until Blackmail, I do hope I am right in these suppositions. But Blackmail used sound with bits of imagination. The famous instances are now famous enough, but let me record how well the sound began, after a man had been caught by the Flying Squad, the detectives breaking into speech for the first time as they left the job. They didn't talk about that, they didn't at once proceed to unfold the drama as dictated by a script. They talked about their tailors as they washed their hands. And how well silence was used, too, that was an advance. It also got us a little away from the dreariness of everything having to be realistic. Smaller directors would not have risked silence in parts of a talkie, because they would have worried about the fact that traffic noises don't suddenly stop, that people don't suddenly cease making a noise. This would have preoccupied them at the expense of what the mind felt. And, a last instance, what an excellent laugh the girl had in the beginning, as she was leaving with her detective-sweetheart. Such a stupid, spoilt laugh. We are prepared at once for her type. Mr. Hitchcock risked making his heroine unsympathetic by that laugh .... or maybe he didn't, maybe he was just giving us an ordinary London girl. Well, that was quite an innovation. He let us think what we liked of that laugh and most directors in talkies don't let us think. They present us with the point of view of someone manifestly unable to think, themselves. People always hold up against talkies that they prevent you thinking, that they "leave nothing to the imagination." That is, save in the terms, true, as at present used. But what should be seen is that if this is true it means that the talkies are impossible to get away from. As an instrument of expression, they are strong, powerful; there is no getting away from them. If a good talkie was made by a good man, therefore, there would be no getting away from it. So that talkie must be made.

In Juno and the Paycock, there are several moments when it is important to some character that there is a noise in the street or on the stairs. The men in trench coats come to take away the informer, or Juno is heard returning by her husband. Hitchcock gives the noises, of course, but he guides the eye at the same time. And not always to match the character's reaction. As far as I remember, the son hears a ring at the door. We are shot to the window, getting the street idea. But the son looks at the door, where the men will enter from the street. The noise of the funeral rising out of the gramophone was well-done in this film, too, but it was a queer film with little bits well done, and no one able to disguise the fact that it was stage players we were watching, in a play that had been filmed as a play, and not re-visualised into a talkie; and above all nothing could disguise the oddity of filming at this date a young girl who advances into the middle of the room when she is going to have a baby, and declaims that there cannot be a God, he wouldn't let this happen. Nor did I find it easy to sympathise with a father who was so horrified at this thing which was described as " worse than consumption ", a father who turned the girl out, and a mother who said, clasping the errant daughter to her chest, never mind, your baby may have no father but it will have what is much better ... two mothers ". Question mark, and echoes of " IS that so? " I mean really, does this sort of thing go on among tenement dwellers, or is it just a dramatist's fancy? It may be remarked that for sheer courage this talkie has not been beaten. For consider, the crying need of British films is a world market, and so they make a long film completely in the Irish' brogue, which is not only very tiring but difficult even for Englishmen to understand completely, so different are the inflections and many of the words. It is not I that would decry experiment, but I do think that for wild courage, Elstree must be given the palm of a really big hand.

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