AFTER reading his latest book one is led to think that Professor Nicoll, head of the School of Drama at Yale, has transferred his first love from the stage to the screen. As a time when many feel that the movies have not merely damaged the stage but will in the end absorb it, it is encouraging to find a well-known authority on the history of the drama presenting the public with a hopeful analysis of the possibilities of cinema.

Mr. Nicoll begins with a disingenuous comparison of the present-day cinema with Elizabethan drama. What appears to be an account of our cinema, "a thing of almost mushroom growth, having a valid tradition which extended over no more than a few decades," whose managers "were intent only on what the box office receipts testified to be of immediate appeal," is a criticism equally applicable to the drama in Shakespeare's day. Having but placed us in a receptive state of mind, Mr. Nicoll proceeds to give an historical summary of the amazingly swift development of the cinema from its genesis thirty years ago. He provides the uninitiated with an informative sketch of the structure of a film and its component parts. He gives his opinion of the proper aims of the cinema and of the roads which will lead to dead ends. The examples used for illustration in his analysis are mainly from the regular run of Hollywood productions; he is less in interested in purely theoretical experi- ments than he is in the improvement of commercial cinema. For the student of the cinema the book is invaluable by virtue of a large bibliography.

Stage and Screen Different

"Already the cinema is beginning to realize 'its true functions; the theatre is losing its desire frenziedly to copy the novel devices of the cinema," says Mr. Nicoll. The great mistake has been that Broadway and Hollywood have tried to be like each other. The cinema should not try to reproduce closely stage plays. In the development of his conviction that the stage and screen are fundamentally different in their possibilities, lies the real value of the book.

One may differ with Mr. Nicoll's thesis that the hope for the theatre lies in its return to themes "presented in conventional forms," plots that "took no account of the terms of actuality," and language that "soared on poetic wings." Mr. Nicoll points out that the trend has been toward naturalistic plays, but that it is a trend with no future. He considers that Maxwell Anderson's "Winterset" fulfills his requirements for the stage: it "aims at building a dramatic poetry out of common expression." Yet, in the theatre, a spectator unacquainted with the text would not be aware of any remarkable differences between "Winter-set" and other good plays in the naturalistic tradition. Black verse seems too easy a cure-all for whatever troubles the stage may have