Practically every play in which he has appeared sprang from his personal suggestion, and in many of them he has collaborated with the scenario writer. The three things that he demands are Action, Wholesomeness, and Sentiment that rings true.
Never make the mistake of thinking that Douglas Fairbanks starts and finishes with mere good humor and physical exuberance. There is more to him than his grin, for his mind is as strong and vigorous as his body.
He reads and thinks, and behind his smile is a quick and eager sympathy that takes account of the sadnesses of life as well as its promises.
"The Habit of Happiness" was very much his own idea, and in it he took occasion to show a midnight bread-line, the misery of the slums, and various forms of social injustice. It isn't that he thinks himself called to uplift and reform, but, as he expresses it, "Every little bit helps."
In the last talk that I had with him, he was enthusiastic over the future of the movies as a world force. He speaks in ideas rather than words, for when he feels that he has indicated the thought he never troubles to finish the particular sentence.
"Pictures are like music," he declared. "They speak a universal language. Great industry--just in its infancy--before long films will pass from one country to another--internationalism. Why not? Love, hate, grief, ambition, laughter--they belong to one race as much as another--all peoples understand them. It's hard to hate people after you know them. Pictures will let us know each other. They'll break down the hard national lines that now make for war and suspicion."
Other things followed, for we discussed everything from cabbages to kings, and then I plumped the question at him that I had been waiting to ask from the first.
"How do you like the movies as compared to the speaking drama? Come now, cross your heart and hope to die. When the night comes down and the lights go up, isn't there a blue minute now and then?"
"Surest thing you know," he grinned. "It isn't because there's such a radical difference between the 'talkies' and the movies, however." [He refers to musical comedy as the "screamies."] "The play in the theatre is largely a matter of pantomime, you know. Dialogue is employed to advance the actual plot only when it is impossible or impracticable to do it with dumb show. And when I think of some of the lines I've been called upon to spout, I can't say that I regret the movies' lack of dialogue.
"What does hurt, though," he admitted, "is the absence of response. I don't mean applause, but the something that comes up over the footlights to you from the audience, the big something that tells you instantly whether you have hit it or missed, whether you are ringing true or false. You don't get that in the pictures. Your audience is the director, and you know that it will be weeks or months before your work is going to get its test.
"But in everything else, the movie has the talkie skinned a mile.
Instead of mouthing somebody else's words, you are doing the thing yourself. There's action, and life--one day you are in the forest, the next in the desert, the next on the sea."
"Nonsense!" I exclaimed. "I understand that it's all done in a studio."
"I had the idea myself," he laughed. "But no more. When I was in the 'talkies,' I used to hear a lot about realism. Father must wash in a real basin with real water and real soap. There had to be two hens at least in every barnyard scene, and when Lottie came home from the cruel city, she had to have a real baby in her arms. Lordy, I never knew what realism was until I struck the movies. They've gone crazy over it.
"'The Half-Breed,' you know, was adapted from one of Bret Harte's stories, and nothing would do the director but a trip up to the Carquinez woods in northern California. A forest fire figured in one of the scenes, but I never thought much about it until I saw them bringing up some chemical engines, hose reels, and five or six fire-brigades.
"'What's the idea?' I asked.
"'To keep the flames from spreading,' they told me.
"And let me tell you, it was _some_ fire. After I got out of it I felt like a shave from a Mexican barber."
"What effect is the movie going to have on the speaking drama?" was my next question.
"Look at the effect it's had already," he said. "Shaw is the only playwright clever enough to write dialogue that will hold any number of people in the theatre. The motion picture has made the public demand _action_. It has changed the plot and progress of the drama completely."
"Do you think that a good thing? Doesn't it mean the substitution of feeling for thinking?"
"Well," he answered slowly, "the world goes forward through the heart rather than through the head. Happiness, to my mind, is emotional, not mental. And the movie _has_ brought happiness to millions whose lives were formerly drab and sordid. I love to go into these little halls in out-of-the-way places, and see the men, women, and children packed there of an evening. Theatrical companies never reached the villages, and the men had no place but the saloon, the women no place but the kitchen or the front porch. The camera has brought the world to their doors, and life is richer, happier, and better for it."
Take him as he stands, and Douglas Fairbanks comes close to being the "real thing." Men like him as well as women, and, best proof of all, the "kids" adore him. On a recent visit to Denver, his old home town, youngsters followed him in droves, clamoring for a chance to "feel his muscle." The mayor, no less, had him address a public meeting, the feature of which, by the way, was this piped inquiry from the gallery:
"Say, Doug, can youse whip William Farnum?"
And let no one quarrel with this popularity. It is a good sign, a healthful sign, a token that the blood of America still runs warm and red, and that chalk has not yet softened our bones.