“Failures of the spoken drama may become the stars of the picture palace.  And there are the authors with imagination, visualization and first-rate verbal gifts who can write novels and epics, but cannot for the life of them write plays.  Well, the film lends itself admirably to the succession of events proper to narrative and epic, but physically impracticable on the stage.  Paradise Lost would make a far better film than Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman, though Borkman is a dramatic masterpiece, and Milton could not write an effective play.”

Note in especial what Shaw says about narrative, epic, and Paradise Lost.  He has in mind, no doubt, the pouring hosts of demons and angels.  This is one kind of a Crowd Picture.

There is another sort to be seen where George Beban impersonates The Italian in a film of that title, by Thomas H. Ince and G. Gardener Sullivan.  The first part, taken ostensibly in Venice, delineates the festival spirit of the people on the bridges and in gondolas.  It gives out the atmosphere of town-crowd happiness.  Then comes the vineyard, the crowd sentiment of a merry grape-harvest, then the massed emotion of many people embarking on an Atlantic liner telling good-by to their kindred on the piers, then the drama of arrival in New York.  The wonder of the steerage people pouring down their proper gangway is contrasted with the conventional at-home-ness of the first-class passengers above.  Then we behold the seething human cauldron of the East Side, then the jolly little wedding-dance, then the life of the East Side, from the policeman to the peanut-man, and including the bar tender, for the crowd is treated on two separate occasions.

It is hot weather.  The mobs of children follow the ice-wagon for chips of ice.  They besiege the fountain-end of the street-sprinkling wagon quite closely, rejoicing to have their clothes soaked.  They gather round the fire-plug that is turned on for their benefit, and again become wet as drowned rats.

Passing through these crowds are George Beban and Clara Williams as The Italian and his sweetheart.  They owe the force of their acting to the fact that they express each mass of humanity in turn.  Their child is born.  It does not flourish.  It represents in an acuter way another phase of the same child-struggle with the heat that the gamins indicate in their pursuit of the water-cart.

Then a deeper matter.  The hero represents in a fashion the adventures of the whole Italian race coming to America:  its natural southern gayety set in contrast to the drab East Side.  The gondolier becomes boot-black.  The grape-gathering peasant girl becomes the suffering slum mother.  They are not specialized characters like Pendennis or Becky Sharp in the Novels of Thackeray.

Omitting the last episode, the entrance into the house of Corrigan, The Italian is a strong piece of work.