Little Champ.
While watching Jackie Cooper's startling performance in "The Champ" one thinks of various great actors and of the ages of anguish they survived in the effort to gain the degree of experience supposedly essential to histrionic success. One thinks of George Arliss, struggling patiently up the years from Bloomsbury; one thinks of the young and friendless Alfred Lunt, carrying spear after spear in Boston's Castle Square Stock company; one thinks of Eleanora Duse, growing up laboriously in the raffish atmosphere of itinerant carnivals, developing her art gradually before insulting audiences in Pisa and Verona.
Then one considers that here, in the brief but substantial person of Jackie Cooper, is an inexperienced eight-year-old who can act rings around the best of his elders.
Are all of the revered tenets and traditions of the theatrical profession grotesquely wrong? Apparently they are. Or perhaps Jackie Cooper is merely one of those miracles that are apt to happen, even in so prosaic an age as the present one.
The former Jackie, of the house of Coogan, was astonishing, marvellous. It is impossible to forget the appeal that he exerted in "The Kid," "Oliver Twist," and other productions of that ancient period. But Jackie Coogan was enveloped in silence, which was a great protection (as many ex-film stars will mournfully tell you). Not only did he have to learn and utter no lines; he was always subject to direction from Charlie Chaplin, Frank Lloyd or his parents. Dreadful as it may be to say it, there was something of the trained monkey in his performances.
With Jackie Cooper, and with sound, it is vastly different. He can be stuffed with instructions and advice before each scene starts, but when the red light flashes and the gong rings to announce that the microphone is on, the child is turned loose to do or die for dear old Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He is his own master, the captain of his own fate.
He has to deliver the speeches, make the gestures, suggest the emotions - and how he delivers! Playing long dialogue scenes with Wallace Beery and Irene Rich, and sometimes long scenes by himself, he displays a degree of appreciation and of skill that is absolutely inexplicable.
He is flawless in the reading of his lines; he never fails to pick up a cue at precisely the right instant; and, what is most extraordinary of all, he is a perfect listener.
When he did these things in "Skippy," many of us assumed that the credit for his brilliance should be given to the director, Norman Taurog (who, I believe, is Jackie's uncle). Now in "The Champ" he does them again, and with more assurance, under the direction of King Vidor, who is no relative.
Mr. Vidor is a soft-spoken, gentle artist, with several children of his own, and I can readily imagine that he would exert exactly the right methods of insinuation and cajolery in his direction of a child (just as he did with Nina Mae Mckinney in "Hallelujah"). But that doesn't account for more than a fraction of the bewildering results that Jackie Cooper achieves.
We can only assume that black magic is again at work in this world, and let it go at that, and then flock to 'The Champ' to behold something that, in any age, must be hailed as superlative acting.