Where Drama Was Keener Felt

Melodrama Meant Much, and Why Not?

I've got this need to escape present time and show-go when it was immediate, and more so, communal. Laugh and the audience laughs with you, say many with regard comedy, but when melodrama played to crowds, it was mirth plus tears they shared, and gladly so. We lost that when everyone got smugly superior to performance, stage or screen, rather than surrendering to it. Do we at least cry where alone with a film that moves us? I wept at a recent and private sit through Now, Voyager, affected as much by WB craftsmanship, and Max Steiner music, as Bette Davis' romantic, then mean mom, travails. To blubber through a feature has cleansing value, the "good cry" called that for plenty good reason. People went to stage melodramas, and then nickelodeons, to let out emotion otherwise kept at bay. Now it seems we suppress at theatres and spill guts for venues more public and less appropriate (like social media, a too-oft indifferent, or harshly judging, host). At least there were darker places then to dab tears, or laugh uproariously, theatre-going a shared experience that still offered a kind of privacy. You were among a crowd, alone in your seat at least, and not penalized for feelings you'd experience.

I lately watched and gathered evidence from two otherwise unrelated features, The Old Fashioned Way and The Spiral Staircase. Both are period set (late 19/early 20th, century) and have segments where an audience sees drama on a hometown stage (The Old Fashioned Way), or on a screen hung in a hotel parlor for entertainment of guests (The Spiral Staircase). Each convey a sense of how such entertainment was received by patronage long past. How wonderful it must have been to take drama on face value and let yourself be swept away. An age of innocence, perhaps of naïveté, but a night at the show could truly be one to remember, with no shaming for edge-of-seat you sat, or tears you shed. Release of what was pent up was primary goal of entertainment then. Getting above such basics would cost us a lot. The Old Fashioned Way features a re-staging of The Drunkard, a play introduced in 1843 at one of P.T. Barnum's theatres. Almost a century later (1933), The Drunkard was revived in Los Angeles and became a sensation. Something very old had become preciously new again.

People went to see The Drunkard over and over. Traditional seating gave way to tables where food and drink could be enjoyed. Crowds were encouraged to applaud virtue and hiss villainy. This was antiquity that 1933 had progressed far beyond, or had it? The twist was customers arrived to jeer but developing instead a real affection for The Drunkard and its return to a simpler, if more genuine, era. Lots re-saw their youth, devoted fans John Barrymore, Mary Pickford, Boris Karloff, and especially W.C. Fields (he attended the play thirty times) not so far removed from a time when The Drunkard and others like it were less object of gentle ridicule than drama taken straight. Fields wanted to celebrate The Drunkard and so incorporated the show and much of its cast into a major segment of The Old Fashioned Way, his own rear-view to stock companies and itinerant roads they traveled. Fields starred as a huckster but one step ahead of sheriffs, or landladies done out of room fare. This was a way Fields knew, had lived, and clearly had great nostalgia for, The Old-Fashioned Way close as any project to The Great Man's heart. The Old-Fashioned Way is in some ways a feature expansion on ideas Fields had explored in The Fatal Glass Of Beer.

As third act highlight, The Drunkard is kidded, but not mocked. We know its time has passed, Fields not so blinded by sentiment as that, but he lets a recreated audience absorb The Drunkard on its own terms, responding in much the manner as mid-1850's viewers might have. They watch with rapt attention. A young couple find pleasure in not only the performance but the fact they are together watching it, a sweetly affecting moment. An elderly pair is even more caught up, the man's response to a tense moment causing his wife to warn, "Henry, remember your heart," that line done sincere and not to make fun of the two. A mother-love song inspires a son in the audience to look lovingly at the parent he has brought along. The Drunkard is received by this period audience as a thing authentic and moving, even as Fields the presenter invites us to laugh with, but not at, them. Here was theatre we are the poorer for having forfeited, The Drunkard and its audience a singular highlight of The Old Fashioned Way.

The Spiral Staircase makes a similar gesture, but with then-newer technology, that of motion pictures circa the early teens. A gathered group is watching a one-reel drama presented for townfolk and hotel guests, the projector hand-cranked in a dark room to piano accompany. The film they see is not identified, but it is The Sands Of Dee, directed by D.W. Griffith and released in 1912. The Spiral Staircase is set around a same period. For this audience, movies are exotic in themselves. They react to the film's tragedy with handkerchiefs twisted and eyes that mirror intensity on the screen. This is what I would like to think real nickelodeon patronage experienced. Imagine coming off the street for a five cent coin to emerge less than an hour later, wrung out from laughter, tears, often as not both. Of course the movies caught on. Naturally they swept competing entertainment to margins. Talkies finished the job of making film dominant. I suspect folks were fully invested in movies from the first one they saw, whether short, silent, or seen on a bed sheet. The Spiral Staircase does a beautiful job enacting what the fascination, and impact, was all about, even as the scene goes on and off within a minute, its purpose to portray characters oblivious to a murder committed on the floor above them. Consider it, then, a lovely pearl contained within generous oyster that is The Spiral Staircase (the feature GPS-visited here).