The Motion Picture and the Novel

Abstract

NEWSPAPER comment on the awards granted in 1951 by the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences made play with the fact that three of the four Oscars for acting went to stage actors performing movie adaptations of roles they had created in the theater: Jose Ferrer in Cyrano, Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday, and Josephine Hull in Harvey. And, it was pointed out in climax, the winning film, Joseph Mankiewicz's All About Eve, is a story about theatrical people. The imputation seemed to be that Hollywood is drawing closer and closer to Broadway. This imputation is, fortunately, only partly true. So far as players go, the closer the rapprochement between theater and screen, the better. The fundamentals of the art of acting are the same in both mediums; to shift now and then from one to the other is, most actors find, instructive and refreshing. But close relationships between movies and stage plays are likely to be disastrous. Hollywood is becoming increasingly aware of this and it is comforting to find that the Academy Awards for the best screen plays went to none of the Broadway adaptations whose actors were honored but to three stories created for the screen: All About Eve (that it deals with the theater is merely coincidental), Sunset Boulevard, and Panic in the Streets. Since the awards express the judgment of thousands of members of the motion picture profession, this is, one may hope, a sign that the makers of movies are increasingly conscious of the precise relationship between their art and her elder sisters. The belief that a movie is simply a photographed stage play is dying but it dies hard. It would have perished long since, of course, if sound had not, in 1929, been added to the movie medium. When the