Naturalness and intimacy have been increasingly the goal in motion pictures. The ideal test of a portrayal is for an audience to feel that here is someone they have met or seen in their own experience, a feeling of complete familiarity. That feeling can be conveyed at present through no other medium so well as the motion picture. It is not as possible to the stage or radio. The ideal intimacy promises to come with television, when the actor will be playing to family groups in the home.
Despite the definite acting technique which the films have de veloped—a development more obvious in retrospect than at the times when the various changes occurred—a foundation of stage acting has been invaluable to successful screen artists. Nowhere else has the necessary training and groundwork been available. Acting is a craft, and not just a matter of pleasing personality.
Academy acting awards since the introduction of sound have re flected largely either a stage background on the part of the honoree or a long apprenticeship in films, or both, as evidenced in the recognition accorded Norma Shearer, George Arliss, Marie Dressler, Lionel Barrymore, Helen Hayes, Fredric March, Wal lace Beery, Katharine Hepburn, Charles Laughton, Claudette Col bert, Clark Gable, Bette Davis, Victor McLaglen, Luise Rainer, Paul Muni and Spencer Tracy.
The annual selections of the National Board of Review and of groups of critics are establishing further standards of merit at which future actors may aim. The annual world box-office poll also has become a dependable measure of popularity. Most fortu nate of all, the permanent record which the film makes of an ac tor's performance will enable generations to come to make their own estimate of the abilities of famous names of the screen.
At the moment, the interrelation of radio and the screen is again widening the scope of the actor's talent. The completion of tele vision experiments is likely to create another technical upheaval, placing still a new emphasis on acting values. The definite trend of the present (1939) is for actors to escape the sense of "acting" entirely, to capture complete naturalness, if anything to under play their parts rather than exaggerate them. Such gifted per formers as Spencer Tracy, Bette Davis, and the British Robert Donat have stamped this hall-mark on the most successful interpretations.
There may be considered to be four general classifications of acting talent today. First, that type of acting personality which, due to the visual and auditory spacing of the theatre, scores on the stage, but whose photographic and vocal equipment cannot cope with the camera. Second, the actor who is at his best in short intensities of expression and thus becomes a star of the screen, but who cannot sustain a two- or three-hour drama in the theatre, due to inability to project his personality to the balcony, or vocal equipment which is not trained to carry over so long an uninterrupted period. Third, the radio star who is a straight vocal personality; who can convey a dramatic situation by voice shading but who might not succeed in other media. And there now is in process of evolution a fourth personality, the successful television star, who must face the severest test of all and combine all the attributes of the other three.
The screen has continually been providing a broader canvas for itself. It has grown artistically and technically to a point where practically nothing in human imagination is impossible of realization, from the human characteristics with which Walt Dis ney has endowed his cartoon creations, as in Snow White, to the magical effects achieved when humans are placed in the realm of fantasy, as in the Wizard of Oz.
It has become a truly international means of expression. as Europe and America have exchanged stars and production ideas. Hollywood itself has gone afield and extended its production en terprises to other countries, notably to England which has yielded Donat, Merle Oberon, Laughton, and Wendy Hiller, and where such memorable films as The Citadel, Pygmalion, and Goodbye, Mr. Chips have had their inspiration and fulfilment. Sacha Guitry has become as familiar a personality to America as Clark Gable and Robert Taylor to France.
Leaders in every field of endeavour no longer scorn the newest of the arts, which is rapidly embodying the functions of all the arts. Finer, more literate and more thought-provoking vehicles are providing actors with continually finer opportunities. Acceptance of their talents by motion pictures may well represent the epitome of hopes of the artists of the future. (F. MN.)