Confidences Off-Screen “What a World We Live In” 1925

Confidences Off-Screen

By W. Adolphe Roberts

“What a World We Live In”

Motion Picture Magazine January 1925

Going to see Lillian Gish isn’t just another interview with a popular star. It is a privilege and a rare pleasure. For she is the heart-breaking girl of Broken Blossoms—the screen’s greatest actress, in my opinion. She is a tragedienne with power to evoke beauty by means of tenderness, pity, and a quality of glamour that defies all analysis. Her genius, as understood and developed by Griffith, stands as our best assurance that motion pictures are a new art, not merely an industry. And in saying this, I do not overlook the contribution made by Charlie Chaplin.

He is very great. But tragedy, inevitably, is more lofty than farce. He would be the first to admit it. When I went up to Lillian Gish’s suite at the Ambassador, do you know what I found her doing? In a mood of wondering delight, she was playing with her first radio set, a portable contrivance finished to resemble a suitcase, which she had placed on a chair beside an open window.

“Ah, Mr. Roberts! Look at this, listen to it!” she cried. “Voices from the air. Sounds and music that have always been about us, but that we’ve only just learned how to hear. What a world we live in!”

She sat down then on a divan, her hands crossed in her lap, like an exquisite child, and we talked of the magic kingdom of art. One of the most admirable things about her is the complete sincerity with which she takes her work. She would never lend herself to the making of a picture that pretended to be what it was not. The scene of Romola, for instance, is in Florence at the height of the Renaissance, and had it been asked of her she would have refused to do the film with sets fabricated in a Hollywood studio.

Lillian Gish – Romola

“It’s possible to reproduce an old street, or to build a seemingly perfect copy of a palace where men and women have loved and died, and yet fail utterly to capture the spirit of the place,” she says. “The very stones of Florence have individuality. The sun shines there, and the rain falls, thru an atmosphere tinted otherwise than ours. The human throng moves to a different rhythm.”

She told me she had dreamed for years of making The White Sister, for the sake of the scene in which she takes the veil as the bride of Christ. The initiation of a nun is literally a wedding, a mystic ceremony of great beauty. As Miss Gish shows it, no detail is faked. She steeped herself in the ritual before she was willing to use it as an actress. And she declined to give the picture the conventional happy ending that would have meant having the nun escape from her vows and marry the lover who had lost her thru no fault of his own. It would have cheapened the whole conception, she says. Miss Gish is now planning to do Charpentier’s opera Louise as a motion picture. Final arrangements have not been made, but if the project goes thru the public has an artistic treat in store for it. You see, Paris—the real Paris of poets arid artists—has never been portrayed on the screen except in the most faky manner. Louise is the masterpiece that furnishes the best pictorial opportunities, and with Lillian Gish as the heroine we may be sure that none of its poignancy will be lost. It will gain, in fact. She will add to it her own incomparable charm.

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