Up past the point of the clutching hand this film is the prime example for study for the person who would know once for all the differences between the photoplays and the stage dramas.  Along with it might be classed Mrs. Fiske’s decorative moving picture Tess, in which there is every determination to convey the original Mrs. Fiske illusion without her voice and breathing presence.  To people who know her well it is a surprisingly good tintype of our beloved friend, for the family album.  The relentless Thomas Hardy is nowhere to be found.  There are two moments of dramatic life set among many of delicious pictorial quality:  when Tess baptizes her child, and when she smooths its little grave with a wavering hand.  But in the stage-version the dramatic poignancy begins with the going up of the curtain, and lasts till it descends.

The prime example of complete failure is Sarah Bernhardt’s Camille.  It is indeed a tintype of the consumptive heroine, with every group entire, and taken at full length.  Much space is occupied by the floor and the overhead portions of the stage setting.  It lasts as long as would the spoken performance, and wherever there is a dialogue we must imagine said conversation if we can.  It might be compared to watching Camille from the top gallery through smoked glass, with one’s ears stopped with cotton.

It would be well for the beginning student to find some way to see the first two of these three, or some other attempts to revamp the classic, for instance Mrs. Fiske’s painstaking reproduction of Vanity Fair, bearing in mind the list of differences which this chapter now furnishes.

There is no denying that many stage managers who have taken up photoplays are struggling with the Shakespearian French and Norwegian traditions in the new medium.  Many of the moving pictures discussed in this book are rewritten stage dramas, and one, Judith of Bethulia, is a pronounced success.  But in order to be real photoplays the stage dramas must be overhauled indeed, turned inside out and upside down.  The successful motion picture expresses itself through mechanical devices that are being evolved every hour.  Upon those many new bits of machinery are founded novel methods of combination in another field of logic, not dramatic logic, but tableau logic.  But the old-line managers, taking up photoplays, begin by making curious miniatures of stage presentations.  They try to have most things as before.  Later they take on the moving picture technique in a superficial way, but they, and the host of talented actors in the prime of life and Broadway success, retain the dramatic state of mind.