Moving Day is at present too crassly material.  It has not the touch of the creative imagination.  We are overwhelmed with a whole van of furniture.  Now the mechanical or non-human object, beginning with the engine in the second chapter, is apt to be the hero in most any sort of photoplay while the producer remains utterly unconscious of the fact.  Why not face this idiosyncrasy of the camera and make the non-human object the hero indeed?  Not by filling the story with ropes, buckets, fire-brands, and sticks, but by having these four unique.  Make the fire the loveliest of torches, the water the most graceful of springs.  Let the rope be the humorist.  Let the stick be the outstanding hero, the D’Artagnan of the group, full of queer gestures and hoppings about.  Let him be both polite and obdurate.  Finally let him beat the dog most heroically.

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Then, after the purely trick-picture is disciplined till it has fewer tricks, and those more human and yet more fanciful, the producer can move on up into the higher realms of the fairy-tale, carrying with him this riper workmanship.

Mabel Taliaferro’s Cinderella, seen long ago, is the best film fairy-tale the present writer remembers.  It has more of the fireside wonder-spirit and Hallowe’en-witch-spirit than the Cinderella of Mary Pickford.

There is a Japanese actor, Sessue Hayakawa, who takes the leading part with Blanche Sweet in The Clew, and is the hero in the film version of The Typhoon.  He looks like all the actors in the old Japanese prints.  He has a general dramatic equipment which enables him to force through the stubborn screen such stagy plays as these, that are more worth while in the speaking theatre.  But he has that atmosphere of pictorial romance which would make him a valuable man for the retelling of the old Japanese legends of Kwannon and other tales that are rich, unused moving picture material, tales such as have been hinted at in the gleaming English of Lafcadio Hearn.  The Japanese genius is eminently pictorial.  Rightly viewed, every Japanese screen or bit of lacquer is from the Ancient Asia Columbus set sail to find.

It would be a noble thing if American experts in the Japanese principles of decoration, of the school of Arthur W. Dow, should tell stories of old Japan with the assistance of such men as Sessue Hayakawa.  Such things go further than peace treaties.  Dooming a talent like that of Mr. Hayakawa to the task of interpreting the Japanese spy does not conduce to accord with Japan, however the technique may move us to admiration.  Let such of us as are at peace get together, and tell the tales of our happy childhood to one another.