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MAMMOTH face looms before you; a face five feet across, making ghastly contortions. A stupendous bleat, something about "my maa-uh-a-uh-a-mee!" dins in your ears. You squirm in front of it, unable to escape; shut your eyes in an effort to dodge the grimaces, but cannot do anything about that bellow which still pounds on your tympanum. You consider crawling under the seat, but are afraid an usher will see you. It sounds like a nightmare; it is a talking movie.

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To be exact, it is a synchronized film of a vaudeville artiste singing "mammy" song. This is a short talkie subject designed to round out the entertainment in movie houses in place of vaudeville acts, or of a stirring number from "Lives of the Composers." One company alone is turning out four hundred of these sound shorts in the present season. With them on the bill will, of course, be a full-length feature picture, with or without sound effects and dialogue, but from now on, it is safe to predict, it will be increasingly with. It is too late already to do anything for the silent drama but mourn. Gone is the restful charm of the motion picture palace, where thoughtful people could go and ruminate; attend to the picture if it wasn't too terrible and, if

it was, allow their mind to wander, and hold their sweetie's hand. Unfortunately something even more important than this is threatened along with it, and that is a pantomimic art which was beginning to get somewhere.

Most of the talkies made so far have been dismally bad, but it is not altogether their badness which has disheartened those who liked the movies. It is the realization that this invention has thrown the old motion picture into utter confusion and may kill it entirely. They are predicting that the next few years will see the triumph of a new medium which is neither silent drama nor proper spoken drama, but a misbegotten mixture of the two. They say that the movies will talk themselves to death, for once the short and easy road of speech is open, what is to prevent the producers from tossing aside all they have learned about the art of visual expression?

I believe there is a good deal to prevent it, but I shall come to that later. For the present, however, there is no doubt that the talkies have set back the swift and exciting growth of this infant art a good many years, even if, as there is reason to hope, they have not arrested it permanently.

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HE TERM "sound picture" is as wide as charity. The public is invited to "See and hear" films which offer nothing but old-time silent drama, except that its musical accompaniment is recorded on a disc or a strip of film instead of being rendered on the Wurlitzer organ. Other films labeled "with sound" are in that class by grace of miscellaneous roars and rattlings, which are synchronized posthumously. Under this system "The Birth of a Nation" could now be trotted out as a sound picture.

Needless to say, however, it is not such types of production which are causing the stir, but dialogue films of the kind appropriately designated "alltalking," because the characters do nothing else. On the technical side these pictures of the "all-talking" variety are already getting over their early crudities. Voices in the better presentations no longer crackle and grunt, but proceed from the screen in smooth and plausible modulations. It now appears, furthermore, that film conversation need not be deafening; in "Interference," the first full-dialogue effort of Paramount, it was as consciously and carefully lowpitched as the speech of a self-made lady. But the suavity of such a production, gratifying as it is, makes its weakness stand out all the more. The producers are obviously so concerned with giving the customers their money's worth of talk that they paralyze the action. The cus

tomers are so pleased something new that they do mind, and neither do most of the critics, who are pleased a most as easily as the customers But here and there a faint ro is raised to point out that → far talk has killed movemen in the new movie.

Many of those who prote are making talkies themselves Last summer, when exciteme over the new developmen mounted to panic in Hollywood, a larg number of the most brilliant directors and actors of the screen resented the innovation, some of them very bitterl Many of them declared then that t talkies were a passing fad, but t assertion has been heard much less fr quently of late. It may still be tru but at the moment the cash argume is silencing all skeptics. Fifteen dred theatres will have completed sour installations a few weeks from now, a they include practically all of the fir run houses and the large chains. Every big producer has been investing wards of a million dollars-sometimes much more on sound stages and mechanisms, and one may conclude th he will not let it go without a strugg

It all dates back to two or three yea ago, when the Warner Brothers, being in a tight place financially, thoug they saw a way out in certain neglect patents for synchronizing films w music-perhaps even with speech which were owned by the Western E tric. The method they chose, and which they gave the trade name of Vit: phone, is distinguished by the fact the the sound accompaniment is recorda on a disc. The disc revolving on a tur table which is geared with the proje ing apparatus. At almost the same t the Fox Film corporation began exper menting with another Western Electr system in which the sound is photo electrically reproduced on the edge" the strip of film. They called th method Movietone.

One or both of the Western Electr systems are being used by all the in portant producers except Pathé a FBO, which have the R. C. A. Phot phone, another sound-on-film met which was perfected more recent There are on the market a flock of ir pendent devices with names like Pl

Im, Phototone, Vocafilm, Cinéphone, adalatone and what you will; but so ar the public has had comparatively ttle opportunity to judge of their erit.

In 1926 the Warners gave to the orld the earliest progenitor of today's pisy flock. It was a ham picture carring John Barrymore and called Don Juan;" a "Ladies' Home Joural version of the life of that famous wordsman. It had no talking or ound effects; only a synchronized core, and a vocal two-reeler of Marion alley was presented on the same proram. It was greeted with a pattering f polite applause from the metropolian critics, and was promptly forgotten. Despite the pooh-poohing of their ellow producers, the Warners plunged hore boldly into sound, with singing nd cheering embodied in their next few ictures. After a few of these feelers hey produced their great coup, "The azz Singer," which starred Al Jolson, and which is credited with having been he biggest box office success released in 927, even though less than four hunred theatres were then wired for ound. It was at this point that the ther producers began to scratch their eads and wonder.

Realizing that they had more than a ear's start on everybody else, the Varners proceeded to grind out song umbers, dramatic sketches, dance acts nd bits of opera, together with several atch-penny melodramas which had ong dialogue sequences. One of these ad its big moment when Dolores Cosello, as the heroine about to be atacked, piped "Oh, no, not that!" The rst-night audience in New York aughed, and the line was cut, but the picture made hundreds of thousands of ollars just the same.

Last summer appeared the first allalking pictures, "The Lights of New York," and "The Terror," in which ven the names of the art director and The camera man were spoken by a ynchronized announcer instead of beng printed on the screen. They were badly written, badly directed and heaply produced, but "The Lights of New York" grossed almost $50,000 in one week on Broadway, and "The Terror" ran for weeks.

Although the Fox Movietone has had lmost as long a start as the Warner Brothers Vitaphone, its output has been fraction of the latter's, due apparently to greater conservatism. The Fox company has only recently released its

first full-length dialogue feature, but it has done well with news reels and specials of such august subjects as Herbert Hoover making a speech, Mussolini Bernard

imitating imitating Napoleon and Shaw imitating Mussolini. They made a news reel of Lindbergh's take-off for Paris, in sound, which thrilled the public vastly in spite of the fact that the roar of Lindbergh's plane, thus recorded, sounded more like the rattle of a McCormick reaper.

When two such compelling arguments as "The Jazz Singer" and the Lindbergh news reel appeared, respectively, a year and a year and a half ago, one wonders why the screen's mighty men of business helf aloof from sound pictures until last summer. It is rumored that ocular demonstration was what finally swung the balance, and that it was the sight of a dozen or so persons, standing in line on Hollywood Boulevard to see a Warner talkie, that completely unnerved the great men of the movies and sent them in a wild stampede to hire honey-voiced actors and noise technicians.

They had their own reasons for embracing the innovation as soon as they were convinced it would go. It was a matter of common knowledge that the movies had fallen on hard times. A slackening attendance at picture houses everywhere had forced the chain theatre owners to embellish the cinema proper with the "William Tell" overture, col

ored lights, vaudeville acts and song numbers on the Wurlitzer, in order to lure the public. And the public was again getting fed up.

The producers were asked why, having tried everything else, they did not try making better pictures; some that had at least a modicum of intelligence and plausibility. The dwindling gate, the rising ennui, were succinctly diagnosed by Sidney Grauman, prominent West Coast exhibitor, who said: "They know that Clara Bow will always get her man, and that no matter how often the dam breaks, it never drowns any one of importance.'

But the movie people, despite their admitted sins, were not altogether at fault here. Increasingly often they had made good pictures, sometimes brilliant pictures, and most of them, scorned by the small-town patronage, had been box office flops. The vast moron public is sick of its formula, but will tolerate no change in it. In this situation the talkies appeared as a welcome way out.

The first technical problem in making sound pictures was obviously to get rid of extraneous noises. Huge soundproof stages with walls of concrete, air and cork; ponderous doors like the doors of a vault which swing shut, one after another, behind people who come and go; thick carpets to deaden footfalls; padded booths which enclose the camera, so that the grinding of that necessary machine shall not be heard.

-All these are part of the new producing mechanism, along with the microphone which hangs overhead. And already they have practically eliminated "surface," the composite of small, unnoticed sounds which blend together to effect a noise like the scratching of a phonograph needle in the finished film.

The problem of silence, however, was the simplest of the difficulties. Far more obdurate is the letter "s," which becomes a lisp or is lost entirely, and which has so far resisted all efforts on the part of technical experts to correct it. This absence of s's in movie speech either irritates one unspeakably, or else passes quite unnoticed after the first few minutes.

Many sounds are startlingly intensified in reproduction. In a Movietone news reel of Mr. Hoover's speech at West Branch, for instance, the pattering raindrops on the tent over his head sounded like the roll of thunder. As this was a news reel nothing could be done, but in the studio experiments are being made to overcome such defects. One director found that the rustling of a newspaper sounded deafening, but that dampening the paper produced a natural effect. The tramp of feet reproduces like the crack of artillery, but rubber soles reduce it to plausible proportions. Every studio is compiling a sound dictionary; a vast card catalogue in which the directors note the reproducing value of every conceivable noise.

Any one who stops to recollect what quantities of cold water were poured on the silent movie, the radio and every other new thing in its day will be wary about throwing cold water on this one. But on the face of it the difficulties are formidable indeed. One of them is the foreign market, which supplies forty per cent of the total revenue of the films, and from which talking pictures are excluded. The only solution yet found is a separate silent version of each film for the foreign trade.

Dozens of similar questions, great and small, are confronting the movies. What about the many foreign stars whose English is inadequate? People have suggested the use of voice doubles, but this is not a very plausible solution, and for the present actors like Emil Jannings and Conrad Veidt will be supplied with parts of foreigners speaking little English. What about waiting for laughs the varying laughs of hundreds of future audiences?

In the new technique of movie making complication has been piled on complication. Dialogue specialists and sound directors have been added to the list of authors, script writers, directors, editors and supervisors who already putter around trying to improve the quality of the broth. A further embarassment is the question of pace. Screen pantomime has its own natural tempo, which is considerably slower than that of the stage, and when dialogue is held

down to this pace it drags, unless it. carefully managed. In "Interference the sound director, Mr. Roy Pomerey has done his best, which consists of pr longing the pause between phrases exemplified in the famous sentence. "Won't you sit down?" There is still plenty of room for improvement.

It is not hard to see how this ques tion of pace will add one more convolu tion to the problem of shipping silent versions of talking films to the foreign language market, to say nothing of the theatres at home which are not equipped for talking films. The only answer so far has been to make two completely separate versions of each picture; and no more deadly proof than this exists of the cleavage between the silent and the talking film. A simple silent picture is photographed picer meal, with a degree of incoherence, by itself, which spells the wildest confusion to an outsider. So one can readily understand how simple life is going to be for the actor under the new régime. and for every one else.

About the sound newsreels and the short entertainment subjects, there s little or no argument. No one object to them in principle, and every one agrees that they are likely to last. Some of the producers are discovering that short subjects have bright possi bilities when properly staged. A clas sic example is Mr. Robert Benchley's opus, "The Sex Life of the Polyp Technically a monologue, this delectable entertainment is really a fulllength sketch of the slightly embar rassed scholar, the afternoon lectur the shrill, admiring ladies, the iner table tea.

To endow a full-length screen play with speech, however, is quite another matter. Last summer when the move was first threatened all sorts of dire predictions were made about what t would do to the art of the cinema, and enough has happened since then to show that in the next few years they are all going to come true.

In their eagerness for dialogue and nothing but dialogue the producers have rushed out to buy plays. "Interfer ence," "The Trial of Mary Dugan" and "The Letter" are among those which have been or are going to be filmed. If they are all handled like the first one they will not be adapted to a form of expression which the screen has always demanded and still demands, br will be "canned" as nearly as possible (Please Turn to Page 1299)

nce

HE HARDEST problem Europe has had to face ever since the war is now up for final consideration: ust how much is Germany to pay in ar damages? At the Peace Conferof Versailles, the Americans rgued that the amount which the Gerans were to hand over in reparations ught to be definitely fixed. It was angerous and unreasonable, they held, > try to commit a defeated people for n unknown length of time to pay up the limit of a capacity which the ictors practically proposed to deter ine for them. Though the Americans, o less than the Allies, wanted to see Germany made to pay as much as could e secured, they approached the probem with more coolness-naturally, ince their country had not been laid raste. The rejection of their economic oint of view marked one of those funlamental differences between them and he Allies which contributed to the reusal of the United States to sign the Treaty of Versailles.

The end of a decade this autumn saw he Allies, at Geneva, swinging around

t last to the American point of view. And the years between have seen the ickerings between the Allies and the Germans, the occupation of the Ruhr Valley by French forces, the inauguraion of the Dawes Plan for reparations inder an American Agent-General, then

By MALCOLM W. DAVIS

clared that Germany can not be forced to assume impossible financial burdens as the price of evacuation of her territory. France, through her most influential newspapers, replies that the tone of his speech holds out little hope of progress in settlement of the issue of war damage payments.

"If Germany maintains the same kind of language during the discussions with the interested governments," writes the semi-official "Temps" of Paris, "there seems reason to feel that there is no assurance on the eventful results of the forthcoming negotiations."

August Gauvain, the well-informed Foreign Editor of the "Journal des Débats" and one of the more moderate writers on international affairs, says: "On reparations Dr. Stresemann has shown himself as trenchant and as single-minded as on the rest of his claims. He does not consent to the payment of a single penny which will cause inconvenience to the German people. One may even conclude from one of his phrases that he has the pretention to wish to verify our reparations bill so as to cut down the amount of what we have paid or intend to spend for restoration."

URTHER, M. Gauvain seems to think

of Nations, the reconciliation at Locarno between the Allies and Gernany, the signature of the BriandKellogg peace pact at Paris, and finally the beginning of discussion of a project to fund both war debts and war damges in one huge international loan which would remove the issue from the sphere of political wrangling to that of practical banking. But some of the emotional difficulties that blocked a workable agreement ten years ago still stand in the way. Gustav Stresemann, Foreign Minister of Germany, in his speech in the Reichstag on reparations, and the response of the French press to his remarks, have revealed these obstacles.

Backed by an immense majority of the deputies, and by the Liberal, Center, and Socialist as well as the Nationalist press, Dr. Stresemann returned to the attack on the presence of Allied troops on the Rhine, and de

make too much of the Briand-Kellogg treaty to outlaw war-an opinion echoed by other French editors-for he says: "The German Foreign Minister took occasion, to praise the Kellogg pact. adding 'It will have the value which the Governments and the people themselves give it.' That, too, is our opinion . . . So why, we are entitled to demand, are the Germans, English, and Americans always quoting it in any discussion of disarmament and security? Some English newspapers are especially insistent on this point. What objection can we have, they ask, to evacuation of the Rhineland since we have the Locarno and Kellogg pacts? But the British guarantee under the Locarno agreement is an engagement subordinate to an estimate of the circumstances by whatever government is in power in England. As for the Kellogg pact, it is as yet only a hope. Its

ratification is becoming more and more doubtful, at least before Mr. Hoover takes over the White House. That apostle of peace, Mr. Coolidge, wishes to have his navy bill voted first of all . . . We are then well within our rights in asking if the fate of this treaty will be the same as was the fate of the Treaty of Versailles?"

ERTINAX (André Géraud), one of

Pthe most acute and widely read of

French political writers, declares in the "Echo de Paris" in a warning article: "Above all, it is essential that no decision shall be taken on our side before it is known what the Reich is prepared to give us for reparations and for security."

"What does it matter," asks a column in the Radical "Volonté" usually contributed by that stormy petrel of French politics and finance, Joseph Caillaux (once exiled for treason and recalled after the war to attempt a debt agreement with the United States and a rescue of the sinking French franc), "if Dr. Stresemann declares that he does not want to admit subordination of Rhineland evacuation to the establishment of a definite settlement of reparations, provided this evacuation does not in fact take place until after a settlement has been made?

"Berlin is merely playing the same kind of game as Washington. The Rhineland and reparations are separate affairs, declare the Germans. But they will, just the same, be compelled to negotiate the two affairs at the same time. Reparations and debts are different affairs and we are concerned only about the second, declare the Americans. But if they want to collect their debts they will just the same have to finance reparations. . . Let us by all means separate all the problems the war has left . . . But let us negotiate them all at the same time."

There the argument comes to the point: How much more may illmannered, uncultured, but nevertheless good-natured and wealthy Uncle Sam, come down after all in his demands on us Europeans for payment of war debts?

And how much may he be persuaded to advance in private loans to transform them from obligations to the government into obligations to the citizens who become holders of bonds?

A woman can

The tragedy of this family has been its daughters. It is not that the women of Italy are not strong and able. Could they not live up to what was expected of them as women, and yet any day equal the men in strength? No, this was not the point. not seek a husband-a woman must wait for a husband like honey in a flower, like a fish in a pool, like a spider in a web. And the flower and the pool and the web are money. For what good is a wife to a man unless she has a dowry?

There were too many sisters in this family and there was no money at all. Sometimes it seemed to these sisters as though they lived in a world specially fashioned for them. In this world was hunger for all things. In this world. was hard work and an empty stomach, cold hands and an uncomforted body, a cry for happiness and a surrender to misery.

Poverty had come to mean, not an intangible enemy or a phantom wolf, but a great door-as solid and massive as iron-closed harshly between them and a world where other people lived. Beyond that door was warm food, fire and love. One could laugh there and forget to be anxious. One could talk carelessly and move with forgetfulness. One could listen to music without having to weep.

It was perhaps the music in their blood that sharpened these knives of hunger and despair. For at a distant time, certainly, some far-removed ancestor had poured his blood into the fiddle that lay on the top shelf of the cupboard. It was old and worn and dilapidated; no one could play it any more. What time had they to be fooling with fiddles? And yet it was tradi

beyond the door. For the sake of that tradition and that dim ancestor, they guarded it. They had guarded it when everything else went for fuel, when anything that would burn was gathered up as avariciously as food. Some one in a vague past had valued it, and their last faint inheritance lay in their ability to value it.

Then, too, there was a superstition about the old fiddle. Somewhere inside it was a life, a pulse, a voice. When storms shook the tiny cottage, when a rough scouring hand grasped the cupboard shelf too carelessly, when a younger child climbed high to find a plaything the fiddle had been known to speak, to cry out sometimes as if from a bad dream, and once in a while to utter a sound of musing that fell into the hut like a coin of golden sunlight.

HE SISTERS could not have told when

Tit first occurred to them that the

violin might have a value in money. The fiddle represented one kind of value, money everything else. It was unlikely that the two values could ever merge, but it was a tremendous thought. The fiddle was suddenly a golden key to that other world or at least a corner of it.

But old men, lurking like spiders behind the dingy counters of cob-webbed shops, saw nothing of all this. They looked dubiously at the worn and dingy fiddle. They shook their heads. Good enough, perhaps, for a village dance, but who would buy such a thing? Take it home and try to get what pleasure could be had from it to amuse them

strange people with outlandish habits one speaking one language, one ar other, in accents that fall harshly the acute ears of the soft-voiced peasants. Music is not easily to be associated with these people.

When the visiting Englishman was first pointed out to the family of sisters, they stared dubiously. This man an authority on music on the sound of musical instruments? But he was English. And had not their own country people, those wise, shriveled, shrewi old men, already assured them that their treasure was worthless? Still. these English had money. At least. they could show him the fiddle. If he knew nothing, they might persuade him it was worth something. If he really were so great an authority they could do no worse than be disappointed again

Well, at least they were lucky. The Englishman was at home. He would look at the fiddle. He was evident used to these affairs. A great many people must have asked his opinion an the value of violins-thousands of violins enough to make any one weary to think of it. They unwrapped the old tradition, and one of the sisters held it up to him in doubtful hands.

For a minute, the Englishman did not move, but ran his eyes over the body of the fiddle as a pianist runs critical fingers over a key board. The he looked at the sisters and drew & deep breath. He lifted it gently from the rough and awkward hands and he!! it out where sunlight beat more strongly. He spoke only one word as he turned toward them again.

"Stradivarius," he said softly.

ACK in the hut, the sisters struggled

in gold.

was

With each new hope, with each timid trial, with each refusal that massive door closed again in their faces. Perhaps these old men were right. Perhaps it was nothing but a worthless fiddle. But they had nothing else to believe in; doubtless that was why they could not stop believing in the only possession that had ever been theirs.

Not far from the village where the sisters lived is a region of Italy so beautiful that foreigners, looking for health and peace, spend their vacations there. They are observed from a distance,

with their reeling wits. In Englis money-what was it the gentleman had said? Seven thousand pounds, his firm would pay for it.

They were still young. They knew they could be pretty. The suitors tha' were to besiege their cottage already approached in imaginary array. That other world where strangers lived was even now rising about them, like a gar den of magic flowers. There was r longer any iron door-but the top shelf of that high and dusty cupboard was suddenly as empty as a grave. golden voice had gone.

Th: