Shakespeare's plays is good enough movie stuff, but it has not been their plots that have carried them undiminished through three centuries during which our common speech has changed so greatly that Elizabethan English is intelligible only with an effort to the man in the street and the girl who reads a picture newspaper. Once familiarized with the bare bones of Shakespeare via the movies, however, the illiterate and the semi-literate may, I surmise, be prepared to enjoy the plays as their author wrote them. If that is so, Tree's "Macbeth" and other losing ventures in pictures have served a purpose.
There is this to be said in justice for the films: Their defects are, by and large, the defects of their audiences, and they are improving as rapidly as their audiences will permit them. No entertainment rises higher than its source, and its source is the money paid into the box office. Youth, from sixteen to twenty-five, forms the bulk of the chronic picture-goers and dictates the programs. It is said that a feature picture to-day must please nine million persons to turn a profit. There is explanation enough.
Tom Ince, who died two years ago, probably was the best continuous box-office director-producer in the business. He knew the public's
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