Cinema Album

An exception to the rule that books about movies are even duller than movies about books is A Pictorial History of the Movies (Simon & Schuster; $3.95). Its 700-odd movie stills have been assembled by Bryant Hale and Marcelene Peterson, and more conspicuously credited to Composer-Critic Deems Taylor. His touch is evident in the captions, which outline the history of U.S. films from the scandalous The Widow Jones of 1896 to Mrs. Miniver. By turns touching, noble, hilarious, incredible, the pictures in this book have the endearing dignity and fascination of a gigantic family album. Reproduced on this page, reading down and across, are:

P:Rescued from the Eagle's Nest, by Edwin S. Porter, whose The Great Train Robbery (1903), being the first movie ever to tell a story, is one of the most important films ever made. The baby is anonymous. The eagle is stuffed. The Nature is by Richard Murphy. The Nature's Nobleman, who later rescues the baby, was played by a young actor named David Wark Griffith.

P:D. W. Griffith and his great cameraman Billy Bitzer, here shown working with Henry B. Walthall in The Escape, were the Founding Fathers of cinematic art. They discovered the closeup, the cutback, the truck shot (camera moving forward or backward), the fadeout, the fuzz-focused heroine's head which, esthetically, is Hollywood's chief inheritance from them. Some of their action sequences in The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), together with many by their brilliant, neglected contemporary, Thomas Ince, have seldom been equaled, never surpassed.

P:Theda Bara was a friendly Cincinnati girl named Theodosia Goodman, who became cinema's first femme fatale. Her catch line: "It is very hot in Africa" became a cliche almost as famous in its day as Mae West's "Come up and see me sometime."

P:Harold Lloyd started his screen career as a randy little leprechaun with a Chaplinesque mustache. It was only after Lloyd shaved his lip and framed his eyes that he rose to rival Chaplin at the box office. Shown with him here is Bebe Daniels.

P:Sensation of the peep shows of 1896 was the prolonged kiss which May Irwin and John C. Rice translated from their stage hit, The Widow Jones. Clergymen shudderingly described the film as "a lyric of the stockyards." Now the clinch is to cinema what the final couplet is to the Shakespearean sonnet.

P:Mack Sennett (here working at Mabel Normand's feet) was as great an originator, in his own way, as Griffith. His comedies, always improvised on the spot, gave a vast, fresh native energy to the ancient traditions of clowning. They also made the law laughable and legs lucrative, were a training course for half the biggest stars of the '20s, and the source and schoolroom for the comedies of Rene Clair, the brilliant experiments of Preston Sturges.

P:Flesh & the Devil, under the knowing direction of Clarence Brown, brought to their apogee the most glamorous wrestling team that ever paralyzed the cinecircuits, and drew from a wit of the period the inspired salute:

Here's to Jackie Gilbert,

Now isn't he a darb 'o,

With his nose grown

To her collarbone

Inhaling Greta Garbo.

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