The mood of the original poem is approximated.  The story is told with fireside friendliness.  The pale Lillian Gish surrounded by happy children gives us many a genre painting on the theme of domesticity.  It is a photographic rendering in many ways as fastidious as Tennyson’s versification.  The scenes on the desert island are some of them commonplace.  The shipwreck and the like remind one of other photoplays, but the rest of the production has a mood of its own.  Seen several months ago it fills my eye-imagination and eye-memory more than that particular piece of Tennyson’s fills word-imagination and word-memory.  Perhaps this is because it is pleasing to me as a theorist.  It is a sound example of the type of film to which this chapter is devoted.  If you cannot get your local manager to bring Enoch Arden, reread that poem of Tennyson’s and translate it in your own mind’s eye into a gallery of six hundred delicately toned photographs hung in logical order, most of them cosy interior scenes, some of the faces five feet from chin to forehead in the more personal episodes, yet exquisitely fair.  Fill in the out-of-door scenes and general gatherings with the appointments of an idyllic English fisher-village, and you will get an approximate conception of what we mean by the Intimate-and-friendly Motion Picture, or the Intimate Picture, as I generally call it, for convenience.

It is a quality, not a defect, of all photoplays that human beings tend to become dolls and mechanisms, and dolls and mechanisms tend to become human.  But the haughty, who scorn the moving pictures, cannot rid themselves of the feeling that they are being seduced into going into some sort of a Punch-and-Judy show.  And they think that of course one should not take seriously anything so cheap in price and so appealing to the cross-roads taste.  But it is very well to begin in the Punch-and-Judy-show state of mind, and reconcile ourselves to it, and then like good democrats await discoveries.  Punch and Judy is the simplest form of marionette performance, and the marionette has a place in every street in history just as the dolls’ house has its corner in every palace and cottage.  The French in particular have had their great periods of puppet shows; and the Italian tradition survived in America’s Little Italy, in New York for many a day; and I will mention in passing that one of Pavlowa’s unforgettable dance dramas is The Fairy Doll.  Prospective author-producer, why not spend a deal of energy on the photoplay successors of the puppet-plays?

We have the queen of the marionettes already, without the play.

One description of the Intimate-and-friendly Comedy would be the Mary Pickford kind of a story.  None has as yet appeared.  But we know the Mary Pickford mood.  When it is gentlest, most roguish, most exalted, it is a prophecy of what this type should be, not only in the actress, but in the scenario and setting.