“At the first whistle, get ready,” shouted the producer, “at the second, slow waltz, please.” And then the baronial hall was filled by the crowd of exemplary patience and they danced with unaffected enjoyment, these gay people, just as though no camera were directed on them. The heroine appeared (she was the daughter of the house, and this was her first ball—indicated by a stray curl down her back), and her ravishing pink gown, evidently a choice product of the West-end, looked strange in a disused East-end factory. Of course she had adopted the inexorable “cinema” convention of a “Cupid’s bow” mouth. Here is the youngest of the arts already fast breeding its own conventions. Surely the variety of female lips might be recognized! Women’s own mouths are generally prettier, and certainly more suitable to their faces, than some rigidly fixed type. It would be ungallant to say that the leading lady’s “Cupid’s bow” did not become her, but the shape of her own mouth, I venture to suggest, would have been better still. And where was my friend the notable comedian all this time? Rigging himself out in evening clerical dress for the ball (he was the vicar of the parish), and evidently regarding his momentary deviation into “film” work (for the benefit of a theatrical charity) as great fun. Will the heroes of the “silent stage,” I wonder, ever deviate into “spoken drama”? It would be startling to hear Charlie Chaplin speak. THE MOVIES All is dark and an excellent orchestra is playing a Beethoven symphony. The attendant flashes you to your seat with her torch, you tumble over a subaltern, and murmur to yourself, with Musset’s Fantasio, “Quelles solitudes que tous ces corps humains!” For that is the first odd thing that strikes you about the movies; the psychology of the audience is not collective, but individual. You are not aware of your neighbour, who is shrouded from your gaze, and you take your pleasure alone. Thus you are rid of the “contagion of the crowd,” the claims of human sympathy, the imitative impulse, and thrown in upon yourself, a hermit at the mercy of the hallucinations that beset the solitary. You never applaud, for that is a collective action. What with the soothing flow of the music, the darkness, and the fact that your eye is fixed on one bright spot, you are in the ideal condition for hypnotism. But the suspected presence of others, vague shadows hovering near you, give your mood the last touch of the uncanny. You are a prisoner in Plato’s cave or in some crepuscular solitude of Maeterlinck. Anything might happen.