The stage manager of the theater can paint the ocean and, if need be, can move some colored cloth to look like rolling waves; and yet how far is his effect surpassed by the superb ocean pictures when the scene is played on the real cliffs and the waves are thundering at their foot and the surf is foaming about the actors.

The theater has its painted villages and vistas, its city streets and its foreign landscape backgrounds.

But here the theater, in spite of the reality of the actors, appears thoroughly unreal compared with the throbbing life of the street scenes and of the foreign crowds in which the camera man finds his local color.
But still more characteristic is the rapidity with which the whole background can be changed in the moving pictures.

Reinhardt's revolving stage had brought wonderful surprises to the theater-goer and had shifted the scene with a quickness which was unknown before.

Yet how slow and clumsy does it remain compared with the routine changes of the photoplays.