Anita Snell (1916) 🇺🇸
The recent debut in motion pictures of “The Montessori Baby,” little Anita Snell, is being watched with the closest of interest, not only by members of the profession, but several noted scientists who have been interested in the Snell baby for more than two years. Anita, who is regarded as a five-year-old prodigy, has just completed playing a child part in the big Metro photoplay. Man and His Soul, in which Francis X. Bushman and Beverly Bayne are starred.
Little Miss Snell is a remarkable child in many respects. She was born in Minneapolis, Minn., and displayed many signs of extreme precociousness when first she began to lisp only a few words. Her mother was induced to enter her in the famous Montessori school in Washington, under the direct tutelage of Miss Anne E. George, who conducts the institution. She proved a marvel from the beginning, and could write and form sentences before she was four years old. She has developed a taste for the best things in art which is almost uncanny. The little one considers it a holiday when her mother will escort her to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City, where she knows the names of many of the paintings and sculptures and the names of the artists who made them. Her comment on pictures and statuary in the museum invariably attracts a crowd.
Anita is an excellent pantomimist and mimic; which makes her invaluable in her photoplay work. If there is any fault found with the child around the studio it is her proclivity for causing the artists to become distracted, while at work. She delights in entertaining those around her, but she is never forward in that respect. Little Miss Snell is an accomplished dancer of the classic forms, and imitates all the well known terpsichorean artists. She likes Pavlowa [Anna Pavlova] best of all, although she never misses an opportunity to accompany her mother to see Genée [Adeline Genée], Isadora Duncan, and others of similar distinction.
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Analyzing a Winner
The great success of “The Cheat” much discussed by public and exhibitors — the play destroys some old time directorial superstitions.
By W. Stephen Bush.
Is there such a thing as analyzing a successful film play? If there is what is the practical use of such analysis? I think that an analysis has its great uses. What are the comments we hear among the audience but attempts at analysis? There are times when some obviously strong and successful film play stirs up an extraordinary amount of comment not only among exhibitors but among the patrons as well. The latter do not comment much on what seems to them just usual and ordinary. The program of routine never goes below the surface and the men and women who have sat through a kinematographic table d’hote forget the whole thing before the formal announcement of: “The End.” How different are these men and women when they come out of the theater after having seen something that has really shaken their souls and broken through the masks of convention and routine. Then they are worth listening to.
Of all the features released within the last few months none has been the cause of more favorable comment than The Cheat. There has been no dissent. Exhibitors like to go into a reminiscent mood when they are among themselves and talk of the splendid features they have seen. (They talk of the other kind as well.) Each one believes his own particular favorite the best of course. He does not want to yield the palm to others. There are some film plays, however, on. which all agree and undoubtedly The Cheat is one of them.
Yes, the consensus of opinion on that feature is absolute. It is therefore well worth looking into.
Curiously enough The Cheat smashes one of the fondest beliefs of a certain school of photoplaywrights. This school tells us that the first requisite of success is the enlisting of the audience’s sympathy for one or two characters in the play. The Cheat does not enlist our sympathy for a single man or woman in the play. The first friend to whom I mentioned this fact hesitated to agree with me, but as he re-examined his emotions he admitted that there was no room for sympathy. The Japanese of course invites anything but our sympathy; the frivolous wife who steals to gratify her love of finery and who requites the affections of her husband with rank ingratitude never moves our sympathy and as a woman does not even waken our pity. When the audience in the courtroom goes mad and passionately overrides all law and order the ruling emotion is not pity for the woman but a racial antipathy blazing out in elemental fury. To be sure we are sorry for the husband but we cannot wholly repress a feeling of disparagement.
Another remarkable thing about The Cheat is the total absence of any attempt to teach a lesson. Of course the teaching of a lesson is always woefully out of place in a dramatic entertainment of any kind. Orations on morality are for the pulpit but so many of our playwright, photoplaywrights especially yearn to outline a lesson on the screen. Your true dramatist abhors preaching even more than your theatergoer. When people come to look at a stage or to gaze upon the screen they cannot bear to see a pulpit erected in its place. Not even the prosiest of theologs can possibly extract any thing like a moral from The Cheat. It is a play, nothing more; an entertainment, nothing else. It is a part of “the life which all of us lead, which but few understand but which is full of interest wherever you seize it.”
I have asked a dozen or more experienced film men and a good many more “fans” just what they liked about The Cheat. They immediately began to talk of the branding scene and the climax in the courtroom. There is no doubt whatever that these two scenes are gripping and sweep the spectators on to a veritable tempest of emotion, but there have been other branding scenes and there have been very many other courtroom scenes. The secret of the success of these scenes lies far deeper. It lies in the skill with which the interest has been awakened, it lies in the directorial finesse which makes this interest rise swiftly yet gradually, it lies in the cunning calculation of the climax. The keynote of the play is simplicity itself: The irreconcilable contract between the East and the West. “Never the twain shall meet.” On this most obvious theme, which no doubt the average scenario department would have rejected with scorn, rests the most notable film success of many a month. When you get a director capable of handling the simple and the elemental theme you hear (pardon the paradox) the thunder of the screen. None but Jove can wield the bolt. The Cheat is an echo of the old Greek drama, showing conclusively that the emotions of men and women remain untouched by the lapse of time. For playing on the heartstrings, and rousing fear and terror the instruments are still the same.
In analyzing the success of The Cheat one element must be emphasized — the development in the Lasky school of the purely photographic part. No school has attained greater achievements in this respect. We would have to admire the purely photographic part even if it were not subordinated to the plot. When it is thus subordinated the lighting effects may well be called a new dramatic force. It is dramatic description of a new order. It has a charm which may be much more easily felt than described. It adds an unheard of subtle strength to the photodrama.
To sum up: There is no formula for success on the dramatic screen. While The Cheat is still receiving unstinted praise on every hand the same company produces another play fully the equal of The Cheat in its effects upon the spectator. This play named “The Golden Chance” differs most radically from The Cheat both in theme and in treatment. It is all pathos and wrings our hearts. We dissolve in sympathy.
The Cheat no doubt will serve as a point of departure for many directors or at least for the few who believe that they are capable of learning something. There are quite a number of directors you know who consider themselves divinely inspired and very much above the necessity of learning.
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Collection: Moving Picture World, January 1916