Pecuniary, Aren’t We?

And action has almost vanished. Instead, everyone sits around sweating, talking and worrying about action. While the old hero decided, and fought gun battles galore, the new one spends the whole picture wondering whether to face up to one contest. And this permits some lecturing about Community Responsibility—for when there are morals the morality must be “social” rather than individual.

With the elimination of action, the director has to pad the picture shamelessly. There is a long pause after every speech, thus lending a phony aura of “significance” to the dialogue. Inevitably, the actors in the adult Western are devotees of The Method—spawned by Stanislavsky and hatched by the old Group Theater and the Actors’ Studio. The Method has wrecked acting just as other modern fashions have wrecked esthetic standards in the other arts. For grace and diction and the portrayal of a part, it substitutes the “realistic” emotions of the actor: which somehow always turn out to be mumbling, scratching, shouting and grunting.

JC

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John Abbot Clark

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And action has almost vanished. Instead, everyone sits around sweating, talking and worrying about action. While the old hero decided, and fought gun battles galore, the new one spends the whole picture wondering whether to face up to one contest. And this permits some lecturing about Community Responsibility—for when there are morals the morality must be “social” rather than individual.

With the elimination of action, the director has to pad the picture shamelessly. There is a long pause after every speech, thus lending a phony aura of “significance” to the dialogue. Inevitably, the actors in the adult Western are devotees of The Method—spawned by Stanislavsky and hatched by the old Group Theater and the Actors’ Studio. The Method has wrecked acting just as other modern fashions have wrecked esthetic standards in the other arts. For grace and diction and the portrayal of a part, it substitutes the “realistic” emotions of the actor: which somehow always turn out to be mumbling, scratching, shouting and grunting.