The Ufa Palace in Berlin, now Europe’s largest movie theater with three thousand seats,
was redone in red and gold, and it sports thick, soft purple on the floors and walls. In
spite of its gargantuan size, it is more comfortable than a good number of intimate theaters.
The establishment’s seventy-five-piece orchestra creates a sensation, as do the vast,
undulating golden curtains, which, lit by dozens of spotlights, continuously shimmer in
fantastic colors.
Following an American model, this movie theater will, in addition to films, offer
musical acts, dance numbers, songs, and stage shows in quick succession. In other words,
it will provide a mix of vaudeville, revue, and concerts. We are therefore forced to ask
whether the public wants this full menu of offerings and, secondly, how well the combination
works in the end.
The answer to the first question depends on whom you ask. For my part, I go to the
movie theater to watch movies. If I wanted to hear music, I would go to a concert; if I
wanted to watch vaudeville, I would seek out an establishment where I know I will be
treated to unexpected, precisely orchestrated, first-class numbers. But I go to the movie
theater to relax. I go to avoid being annoyed by human voices and bored by the sluggish
tempo of daily life and the theater. I watch movies to experience the rapid motion of
human activity, the quick succession of images, cheerful and sad emotions created
through cinematic means.
As for the second question, when I hear music in the movie theater, I want it to be
suited to the essence of film; it should match the quick tempo and rapid transitions. So in
this Ufa theater, I expect a tantalizing jazz symphony to match the symphony of bursting
colors on the gold curtains—especially since Ernö Rapée, who up until now has worked
at the Capitol Theatre in New York, is said to be an excellent jazz conductor.1
But instead,
I am forced to listen to the same Tannhäuser overture that is played in every single beer
garden. And it is played in such a way that toward the end, the orchestra and listeners are
practically knocked to the ground by the brash fortissimo issuing from the trombones. I
am forced to listen to two ladies in early-nineteenth-century dress singing a schmaltzy
song accompanied by a plodding ballet-pantomime in an outmoded, kitschy style. I am
forced to watch Deutsches Studentenleben in der Fremde [German student life abroad] for
nearly half an hour, in which twelve costumed background actors mimic living a pleasurable
life by drinking from empty liqueur glasses and belting out songs that were popular
ages ago, all while a collection of poor imitations of revue dancers hop about the stage.
That is, instead of being relaxed and delighted by a good film, I am forced to sit for an
hour through an exceptionally poor attempt at entertainment, one that would have me
fleeing a provincial vaudeville hall. And I am forced to endure all of this simply because
the films that I came to see have been shoved in between all of this nonsense.
So which films are these? The first is an animated film, Die Walrossjagd,2
which is full
of animals moving in the most comical way amid their icy habitat. The film’s musical
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illustration allowed the conductor to demonstrate to us just what he can accomplish when
he is allowed to do precisely what he wants. Next came an Ufa newsreel. And finally the
main film, Charley’s Aunt,3
an indifferently shot, coarsely and unimpressively staged film
with an excessive amount of poorly rendered intertitles. These inspired more audience
laughter than the film itself, as these genteel Oxford lords, students, and young ladies all
speak in an idiom that you can hear on the corners of Friedrichstrasse in the midnight
hours. Had the lead actor not been born of the same mother as Charlie Chaplin,4
absolutely
no one would be lining up to see this film.
I have no desire to say much more about it. More important is the question of what the
future holds for smaller movie theaters and provincial establishments that will undoubtedly
want and need to follow this example of squeezing mediocre films full of nonsense in
between vaudeville acts that are even more mediocre. If the biggest, most profitable, and
most luxurious movie theater in all of Berlin puts on this type of show for six thousand visitors
daily, can you imagine what dreadful things hundreds of thousands of viewers will be
subjected to in these other theaters? After all of the trouble and effort to bring a degree of
culture to cinema, it is now poised to tip straight into an abyss of inartistic barbarousness.
Notes
1. Ernö Rapée (1891–1945) was a Hungarian American conductor who headed the Radio City
Symphony Orchestra and also composed music for silent films. In the mid-1920s, he led the eighty-fivepiece
orchestra at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo and served as guest conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic.
2. A likely reference to The Walrus Hunters (1923), an American animated short by Paul Terry for
Fables Studios.
3. Charley’s Aunt (Scott Sidney, 1925) was an American film adaptation of Brandon Thomas’s popular
British stage farce from 1892.
4. The reference is to Syd Chaplin, half brother of Charlie Chaplin.