HEART INTEREST

HEART INTEREST

HEART INTEREST

N 0 term is more misunderstood by the beginner than heart

interest. The student is told that heart interest stories are

most in demand and at once he begins to load his stories with marriage and giving in marriage, not realizing that this is not heart but love interest.

Heart interest is that quality in a story that excites the kindly emotions. It appeals to the heart and not to the head. It is the deft touch of the practiced hand that invests the characters with a personality that engages our interest and causes us, through that interest, to become absorbed in their adventures and engrossed in the outcome of their small affairs. There need be no trace of sex-love in a heart interest story. Some of the best heart interest stories produced have contained not the slightest allusion to the love of man for a woman.

Take, for an example, the threadbare theme of the old mother from the country who visits her city son. She finds that he has grown away from her and the homely ways she represents. He has married a rich wife; he moves in society and he is ashamed of the rustic and uncouth old woman whose sacrifices and privations enabled him to obtain the education that procured his business and social advancement. He tries to hide her from his friends and she, understanding, returns to her empty, cheerless life "back home. " Properly told— and it has been well told dozens of time in film—there is more grip, more appeal, to this than to the story of the wife who grows above her husband's social sphere, though the two themes are by no means unlike. In this latter theme there is the ever-present feeling that perhaps the husband is to blame rather than his wife; that he is at fault in not having kept pace with her. There is the conviction that if he loved her well enough he would have made some effort to keep her instead of letting her go away. Here, in many instances, heart interest does not develop because the husband does not seem to be a person deserving of the sympathy we are asked by the author to lavish upon him. If he cannot hold his wife's love, he is a rather stupid sort of ass in whom we cannot become interested. On the other hand the mother, lonely in her old age, is a pathetic figure because it is through no fault of her own that her boy drifted away from her It is a part of the cross mothers bear that they bring their children

into the world only to lose them to other interests. The mother is a figure wholly deserving of sympathy. Her condition makes for heart interest.

Mother-love in almost any manifestation is apt to win the heart, for it is the strongest of all human emotions; more powerful and lasting than sex-love because based upon a higher attribute. , But the mere statement that it is mother-love does not suffice. It must be advanced skillfully, it must be presented adroitly so that pathos does not become bathos. A too evident appeal to the theme of mother love is like the waving of the colors or the playing of the national air. It will bring only a mechanical, surface response. Heart interest must make a deeper appeal than this. The mother must not be a lay figure on which is draped the conventional appeal. She must be a living, breathing woman; something more than a woman' in a white wig and a general appearance of suffering. We must be shown that she is real, genuine. Then we must be made so interested in her that whatever affects her happiness is vital to us. It is not the happening, but the result of that happening in happiness or unhappiness to her that rouses our interest.

To turn to patriotism, which too often is made the basis of false appeal, we will suppose a hero captured by the enemy. The villain is, of course, of the opposite side. He is a military man or courtier, and it is through his scheming that the hero is stood against the wall to be shot. At the last instant the United States Consul hustles in with the hero's sweetheart and file of marines from a battleship. The dear old flag is waved and the villain sneaks away, while the audience is supposed to break up the orchestra chairs in their wild delight.

Of course there will always be present in any audience a certain proportion of persons with large hands and small brains to whom this will appeal, and the cunning producers know they will use the hands to convince the manager of the house that he has booked a success. This class of persons has no real intelligence, and the really intelligent in the audience will realize the falsity of the appeal and remained unmoved. There has been nothing in the early action to show that the hero suffers unduly from love of country. The preceding scenes have all been about his love for the girl and his efforts to win her or save her from the villain. The flag is dragged in—literally—to create a diversion and make a cheap appeal. It fails in this, with the majority, because the appeal is so palpably forced.

On the other hand take a man whose love of country amounts to worship. Let him give his life, sincerely, for the sake of the flag he loves and the appeal is made to the heart. One of the earliest fiction stories the European war brought out was the tale of a peasant who is given his choice between death and treachery. He must lead the army of his enemies to the secret pass where a bridge will enable them to gain a strategically advantage. With seeming reluctance

consents and leads the way, despised even by those who are to profit by his falseness to his trust. The author, through half apologies, leads the reader to share this scorn. Then it was suddenly shown that the peasant had deliberately sought to entice them into the trap, knowing that his countrymen were ready to wreck the bridge when the troops should be upon it. He was a hero and not a traitor. Later (by a very few months) the same story but by a different author appeared, with the hero this time a North Sea fisherman who accepted German bribes to lead a submarine through a mined channel and who deliberately steered her into the nets, knowing that he would share the fate of the submarine's crew.

In these cases were shown love of country proven by deed and not dragged in to make a "hot finish. " There was no waving of the flag, no playing of the bands, just the calm, unemotional acceptance of death in the performance of duty to country. It was appealing. It touched the heart. It did not irritate.

Appeal to heart interest must be deft and certain. Tke characters, particularly the leading character, must be so finely drawn that the persons seem real and convincing. Repression, more often than abandonment, is the proper keynote. The mother does not ilabber all over her son but takes in silent patience her rebuffs, and only in the solitude of her chamber does she expose the depth of her wounds. She does not cry out after him and follow him around the stage op her knees like a painted lady playing emotional tag with her latest former flame. Real emotion of the tender sort does not manifest itself in violent action but in greater repression. The hurt is too deep to show upon the surface. It is like the malignant cancer, in contrast to the surface boil that heads, breaks and is cured. This is an error that too many writers make. They think that in pictures forceful acting is always an essential, no matter how untrue to life such actio9 may be. In reality, even in pictures, repression, if backed' by heart mterest shown in situation, is far more impressive in its effect upon the spectator than the most violent ranting.

In its lighter aspects heart interest may arise not through a recital of sorrows, but through a feeling of intimacy and charm that is created between the protagonist and the spectator. We are made to love the people of the play because of their simplicity and genuineness. They become so real to us that we are able to share their delights and suffer their sorrows. They are clean and decent people, whom we like to know.

We must, of course, feel a polite interest and some sympathy for the simple country. maid who goes to the city to seek her fortune and who comes home in a black dress with a baby in her arms. We are sorry for her in a way, but the sorrow is polite and the sympathy conventional. We regret because regret seems to be required, but we are inclined to feel that a woman with sense enough to keep out of trouble would be a welcome innovation. But draw the pathetic little figure of the boarding house drudge, the unloved

daughter of a country home or the girl who is a slave to a father brutalized by drink, and if the character is well sketched we can take a far more genuine interest in such a character than for the more conventional heroine. The wronged lady appeals to the head. We are sorry for her because she got in trouble. We know that she suffers shame and disgrace, but she brought it on herself. On the other hand the slavey or the country maid suffer through no faults of their own. They are clean and companionable, and we can become more interested in the slavey's lost ten-cent piece than in the wronged woman's departed virtue.

This is not to be taken as saying that there are not rich dramatic possibilities in the wronged lady. She can be made the central figure in many important plays, but even here the closer we come to heart interest the stronger becomes the appeal. Perhaps the woman is worse than wronged. Perhaps she deliberately sought a life of shame. Perhaps she adopts a waif to satisfy the craving for affection that she may not otherwise gratify. The officers of the law, advised by the neighbors, come and take the child. A story with this base will be far more vital than one in which the woman shoots her traducer or one in which the lady collects compound interest for her own broken heart. These stories may be vivid, perhaps too vivid, but they will not live in memory. You are working for something more than the immediate check, it is to be supposed. If you are, work for heart interest. It is more permanent. Painted ladies and nudity stories move in cycles, for they soon exhaust themselves. Heart interest is in constant demand.

Heart interest may also be made to contribute to effect without being the base. It may be action and not plot. There may be little touches in a play that lighten and relieve it. In one of the early Biographs there was a scene where the hero sits at the telephone bidding his family good-bye while a friend in an auto is rushing through the streets to save him from suicide. To prolong the action without making/it break through increasing tension a messenger enters the outer office with a telegram. He puts his cigarette down u'pon the polished surface of a table, goes inside, delivers the telegram and returns to resume his smile and the cigarette. It was a momentary, trivial action, but it put a new touch into the scene and enabled the situation to continue. In another suicide story the man, in writing his farewells, upsets a bottle of ink on the table. In a few minutes he will be where spilled ink does not worry, but habit is strong and he mops up the ink before taking the fatal step. The delay enables a friend to arrive. The following scene is tense, but it gains naturalness because of the humanizing touch.

14. Heart interest, it then appears, has two purposes. In its best exposition it is a story that appeals to the kindly emotions. In its secondary manifestation it serves to give reality and naturalness to a forced and unconvincing situation. Its essence is genuineness and sincerity, an intense and convincing sincerity like the personality of

a big-hearted, broad-minded man as contrasted with the assumed cordiality of the floor walker. It cannot, in its best form, be manufactured. It must come from the personality of the writer, though the adept author can, to an extent, train himself to make use of touches and perhaps to achieve the full play.

Take, if you please, the story of "Uncle Tom's Cabin. " Through the latter pages runs the intensely dramatic story of Cassie and Legree. None of this appears in the stage version other than the introduction of Cassie. That story is a story of passion. It is overshadowed by the heart interest in the story of the slave. Uncle Tom is a creature of the heart, Cassie a person of the head.

Come closer to the present. Compare the Wallingford stories with David Harum. Wallingford is the supreme type of adroit man of the world, just a shade too clever for the clutches of the law. We enjoy for the moment the brilliant schemes Mr. Chester concocts for his hero, but the stories lack the charm of the central character of the York State horse trader. We admire the acumen of Sherlock Holmes and Arsene Lupin, but we love Colonel Carter, of Cartersville, and Pollyanna.

17. It is a fine thing to be able to thrill thousands with brilliant dashing exploits. It is a gift of God to be able to move their hearts.