George Jean Nathan and the movies

Posted on October 12, 2010
Filed Under books, miscellany

I’m interested in early film criticism. I recently picked up The Theatre, the Drama, the Girls (Knopf, 1921), a collection of George Jean Nathan’s essays and reviews from the late ‘teens and early ’20s. In those years and for a number of years thereafter, Nathan was America’s preeminent theater critic and a leading intellectual tastemaker. He was H.L. Mencken’s co-editor at The Smart Set, and with Mencken launched Black Mask and American Mercury. I knew that the two of them thought movies were trash for an illiterate audience of yokels, but only now do I understand how deeply Nathan hated the medium. This from “The Deaf and Dumb Menace,” a ferocious essay written in 1919:

More than any other force, more than any other ten forces all compact, have the moving pictures in the last half dozen years succeeded brilliantly in reducing further the taste, the sense and the general culture of the American nation, Like a thundering flood of bilge and scum, the flapdoodle of the films has swept over the country carrying before it what seeds of perception were sprouting, however faintly, among our lesser peoples. And today the cinema, ranking the fourth industry in the States, proudly views the havoc it has wrought and turns its eyes to new Belgiums.

Controlled in the overwhelming main by the most ignorant social outcasts, by the spawn of pushcart immigration, by hereditary toothpick suckers, soup coloraturas and six-day socks wearers, controlled in the mass by men of complete anæsthesia to everything fine and everything earnest and everything potentially dollarless, the moving pictures—the physic of the proletariat—have revealed themselves the most effective carriers of idiocy that the civilized world has known. Here in America, their fortress, they have cheapened a national taste, already cheap, to a point where cheapness can seem to go no further. They have lurked near schoolhouses and seduced the impressionable minds of children. They have crawled up alleys and side-streets, and for thirty pieces of copper have sold youth into æsthetic corruption. They have gagged the mouths of almost every newspaper in America with a rich advertising revenue; if there is a newspaper in the land that has the honour and respectability to call the moving pictures by their right name, I haven’t heard of it. They have bought literature and converted it, by their own peculiar and esoteric magic, into rubbish. They have bought imaginative actors and converted them into farcemakers and mechanical dolls. They have bought reputable authors and dramatists and have converted them into shamefaced hacks. They have elected for their editors and writers the most obscure and talentless failure of journalism and the tawdry periodicals. They have enlisted as their directors, with a few reputable exceptions, an imposing array of ex-stage butlers, assistant stage managers of tank town troupes, discharged pantaloons, and the riff-raff of Broadway street corners. And presently they sweep their wet tongue across the American theatre….

“Thirty pieces of copper” is a nice touch. This isn’t a case of Nathan tossing off a contemptuous bit of filler. “The Deaf and Dumb Menace” goes on for another eight pages; later he refers to movies as “screen dung” and to producers as “art maggots.” What’s startling is that it appeared as film was coming into its own, written in the year Broken Blossoms was released and reprinted the year Chaplin made The Kid. Reading it, it’s hard to believe it issued from the pen of one of the most tuned-in, forward-thinking critics of the era.

Nathan was certainly that. These days he’s often lost to view in Mencken’s blinding radiance, but Mencken would be distressed by that; together they remade the American magazine business. They took over joint editorship of The Smart Set in 1914, and for more than a decade they were the two coolest guys in the room, forcibly dragging American popular culture into the twentieth century. They published and promoted Theodore Dreiser, Eugene O’Neill, Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dashiell Hammett, Willa Cather, Aldous Huxley and many more.

Cue the irony: The great love of Nathan’s life was Lillian Gish. The two probably met in 1924, about the time Nathan and Mencken launched American Mercury, and their romance waxed and waned for years. Nathan publicly hailed her as a great actress, and interjected himself into her career. [Greenbriar Picture Shows reports that Nathan encouraged Gish to make her first talkie, One Romantic Night (1930), which was a disaster.] Gish declined repeated marriage proposals from Nathan, and the affair ended badly sometime in the mid-1930s. It’s fair to assume that none of this improved Nathan’s opinion of the cinema.

Nathan wrote “The Deaf and Dumb Menace” because he was frightened by the threat film posed to theater, and of course movies did indeed upend the legitimate stage—but not all drama critics of the period hated movies. I’m also reading James Agate, a British contemporary of Nathan’s, who was the theater critic for , among others, The Sunday Times in London. Agate was initially dismissive of film, but he couldn’t stop going to the movies and soon was writing a weekly film column for The Tatler. Nathan was a much better critic than Agate, he looked deeper and saw farther, but he couldn’t see the magic in film.

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I assume “The Deaf and Dumb Menace” first appeared in The Smart Set (“A Magazine of Cleverness”). Several issues of The Smart Set from 1919 are available at the Internet Archive. Silent film fans will connect this target of Mencken’s casual wrath, excerpted from his August 1919 column, “Novels, Chiefly Bad”:

The other importations of the season are anything but stimulating. “Blood and Sand,” by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (Dutton) is a tale dealing with bullfights and bullfighters, and is marked by the author’s customary hortatory purpose. The American vogue of Blasco, I suppose, is already declining; such bogus geniuses from foreign parts come one a year, and are forgotten almost as rapidly as they are embraced. The usual procedure is for the season’s hero to be brought over by his publisher and exhibited before a gaping populace. The scheme, however, does not always work. The visit of Arnold Bennett, far from helping his sales, probably did much to diminish them; at all events the Bennett furore sickened and died while he was here, and the women’s clubs have since almost forgotten him. Perhaps that is why we have not been favored by a view of Blasco….

Here’s Nathan on the most powerful producer on Broadway, from his July column, “The Potboilermakers”:

Mr. Belasco provides the major difficulty of my critical career. I tell you quite frankly that I see no way to counteract his Machiavellian but ever-smiling courtesy to me. He suavely invites me to his eighth-rate plays; I write that they are eighth-rate plays; and such is the tragedy of prolonged repetition, no one any longer believes me. But, so long as Mr. Belasco is willing, I am willing. I shall continue to accept his invitations. And I shall pray to God that he will soon produce a first-rate play if only to save my critical reputation and my job. I am determined to write praise of him some day, or bust. For another season of “Daddies,” “Tiger-Tigers,” “Pollys with a Past,” “Tiger Roses” and “Dark Rosaleens” and—so far as anyone believing in my honesty is concerned—I shall be irretrievably lost.

It is the more recent producing technic of Mr. Belasco first to pick out as poor a play as he can find and then assiduously to devote his talents to distracting the audience’s attention from its mediocrity….

Nathan and Mencken share a byline on a long miscellaneous column in each issue called “Répétition Générale,” which in May 1919 included this apothegm: Criticism is the art of appraising that which isn’t in terms of what it should be, and that which should be in terms of what it isn’t.

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