Ibsen is generally the vitriolic foe of pageant.  He must be read aloud.  He stands for the spoken word, for the iron power of life that may be concentrated in a phrase like the “All or nothing” of Brand.  Though Peer Gynt has its spectacular side, Ibsen generally comes in through the ear alone.  He can be acted in essentials from end to end with one table and four chairs in any parlor.  The alleged punch with which the “movie” culminates has occurred three or ten years before the Ibsen curtain goes up.  At the close of every act of the dramas of this Norwegian one might inscribe on the curtain “This the magnificent moving picture cannot achieve.”  Likewise after every successful film described in this book could be inscribed “This the trenchant Ibsen cannot do.”

But a photoplay of Ghosts came to our town.  The humor of the prospect was the sort too deep for tears.  My pastor and I reread the William Archer translation that we might be alert for every antithesis.  Together we went to the services.  Since then the film has been furiously denounced by the literati.  Floyd Dell’s discriminating assault upon it is quoted in Current Opinion, October, 1915, and Margaret Anderson prints a denunciation of it in a recent number of The Little Review.  But it is not such a bad film in itself.  It is not Ibsen.  It should be advertised “The Iniquities of the Fathers, an American drama of Eugenics, in a Palatial Setting.”

Henry Walthall as Alving, afterward as his son, shows the men much as Ibsen outlines their characters.  Of course the only way to be Ibsen is to be so precisely.  In the new plot all is open as the day.  The world is welcome, and generally present when the man or his son go forth to see the elephant and hear the owl.  Provincial hypocrisy is not implied.  But Ibsen can scarcely exist without an atmosphere of secrecy for his human volcanoes to burst through in the end.

Mary Alden as Mrs. Alving shows in her intelligent and sensitive countenance that she has a conception of that character.  She does not always have the chance to act the woman written in her face, the tart, thinking, handsome creature that Ibsen prefers.  Nigel Debrullier looks the buttoned-up Pastor Manders, even to caricature.  But the crawling, bootlicking carpenter, Jacob Engstrand, is changed into a respectable, guileless man with an income.  And his wife and daughter are helpless, conventional, upper-class rabbits.  They do not remind one of the saucy originals.

The original Ibsen drama is the result of mixing up five particular characters through three acts.  There is not a situation but would go to pieces if one personality were altered.  Here are two, sadly tampered with:  Engstrand and his daughter.  Here is the mother, who is only referred to in Ibsen.  Here is the elder Alving, who disappears before the original play starts.  So the twenty great Ibsen situations in the stage production are gone.  One new crisis has an Ibsen irony and psychic tension.