Abstract

Films

The author's views regarding the inferiority of most films to the novels and plays from which they are derived were not directed against every film that is so derived. Of three very successful movies that spring at once to mind out of the recent past, "The Informer," "Thirty-Nine Steps," and "Four Hours to Kill," the first comes from a novel by Liam O'Flaherty and the second comes from a yarn by John Buchan. The point is that their sources do not matter; a spectator in each case would be completely absorbed in what he saw, and completely satisfied in the sense that nothing he saw would occur to him as either foreign to the whole or imperfectly made over from something previously existing in another form. From G. W. Pabst's "The Love of Jeanne Ney," one could learn a great deal not merely about German "technique" ten years ago but about the importance, as well as the unimportance of technique generally.