New-York tribune., 1919-04-06
ON THE TRAIL or THE MOTION PICTURE

whose directness, dryness and neat,
meagre astonishment at a changing
world might, despite his walrus mus
tache, have delineated the old-fash-
ioned New England schoolmistress with
the most august propriety. Other
Cinnamon came and went through
parts large and small all with that
same dry directness, not to say curt
ness; all with peculiarly plain, decent
dignity, like persons with something
serious to do who are thoroughly OBJ
sorbed in doing it. Was this Chinese?
Where, amidst these sobrieties, was
the lurking dagger, the poisoned rose.
the damned softness of the effete
East and all the rest of it that 10000
Anglo-SaXon testimonies had taught us
to suspect up every Oriental sleeve?
There were, to be sure, screens. en-
brofderies, lattices, vases and walled
gardens, all the old and magnificent
wrappings of insidious secrecy "But
whittier had flown the ancient wrong ."
They had become simply screens. vases
gardens. There was no sweet drugged
wine to be got cut of them-not with
the walrus-moustached New England
schoolmlstress clipping about in his
curt and busy way between theml
NO, we never got glimpse of the
genuine Oriental subtlety and insinua
ton until the arrival of Prince Kang.
VINO restored US to sense of what
we expected in Chinese princes, For a
moment. Then there came upon us q
suspicion. The suspicion became
crushing certainty. Still we screwed
round into a little splash of light and
looked at our programme. Prince Kang
was played by Mr.. Benjamin Hendricks.
Jr. That is to say, in a cast of China
men the only person who presented
Chlnaman convincing to our American
ideal was an American.
Heaven forbid that we should chal
lenge the testimony of the ages! But
not being the ages, only just ourselves,
we have to record what we ourselves
saw, then it will be up to the ages and
not us to stick it into the right place
IN their mosaic. For East may be East,
but facts are facts and people are peo-
pie and the facts about those people
whom we saw playing Chinese China
men instead Of Cinnamon lAmer-
icain accused US Of having always made
our feeble approaches to cosmopolitan
understanding with stale mind and
while driven with binders.
There rose in our memory certain
fragments from Photoplay's jubilant
monologue wherein the Motion Picture
speaks:
am the universal language.
have unlocked the riddle of Babel
after fifty centuries of misunder-
standing.
| am California, springing a funny
story in Constantinople.
am vertical and eternal peace
table and my conference has five hun
dred million delegates.
am the shy confession of Miss and
Mam'selle and Senorita.
am a Caspian fisherman visiting a
coffee planter in Santos.
| am the universal language
yes" we said, "but not if you're al
ways manufactured in Universal City,
you're not"
Universal City, as a matter of fact,
we have only rushed in for an cpl
grammatic clincher; what we mean is
that pictures about those strange crea-
lures, foreigners, with stories written
by American authors and acted by
American actors, are not likely to turn
out about foreigners at all, but add
to our cosmopolitan understanding
mere figures of ourselves in fancy
dress for the sympathetic parts and,
for the unsympathetic parts, mere
stock bogies, in some danger of spread
ing Misunderstanding for still another