who are as brainy as people dare to be and still remain in the department store film business.  No three people would more welcome opportunities to outline the idealistic possibilities of this future art.  And a well-known American painter was talking to me of a midnight scolding Charlie Chaplin gave to some Los Angeles producer, in a little restaurant, preaching the really beautiful film, and denouncing commerce like a member of Coxey’s illustrious army.  And I have heard rumors from all sides that Charlie Chaplin has a soul.  He is the comedian most often proclaimed an artist by the fastidious, and most often forgiven for his slapstick.  He is praised for a kind of O. Henry double meaning to his antics.  He is said to be like one of O. Henry’s misquotations of the classics.  He looks to me like that artist Edgar Poe, if Poe had been obliged to make millions laugh.  I do not like Chaplin’s work, but I have to admit the good intentions and the enviable laurels.  Let all the Art Museums invite him in, as tentative adviser, if not a chastened performer.  Let him be given as good a chance as Mae Marsh was given by Eggers in Fullerton Hall.  Only let him come in person, not in film, till we hear him speak, and consider his suggestions, and make sure he has eaten of the mystic Amaranth Apples of Johnny Appleseed.

CHAPTER II

THE PHOTOPLAY OF ACTION

Let us assume, friendly reader, that it is eight o’clock in the evening when you make yourself comfortable in your den, to peruse this chapter.  I want to tell you about the Action Film, the simplest, the type most often seen.  In the mind of the habitue of the cheaper theatre it is the only sort in existence.  It dominates the slums, is announced there by red and green posters of the melodrama sort, and retains its original elements, more deftly handled, in places more expensive.  The story goes at the highest possible speed to be still credible.  When it is a poor thing, which is the case too often, the St. Vitus dance destroys the pleasure-value.  The rhythmic quality of the picture-motions is twitched to death.  In the bad photoplay even the picture of an express train more than exaggerates itself.  Yet when the photoplay chooses to behave it can reproduce a race far more joyously than the stage.  On that fact is based the opportunity of this form.  Many Action Pictures are indoors, but the abstract theory of the Action Film is based on the out-of-door chase.  You remember the first one you saw where the policeman pursues the comical tramp over hill and dale and across the town lots.  You remember that other where the cowboy follows the horse thief across the desert, spies him at last and chases him faster, faster, faster, and faster, and finally catches him.  If the film was made in the days before the National Board of Censorship, it ends with the cowboy cheerfully hanging the villain; all details given to the last kick of the deceased.