Recently, in the comments to the Rex Parker does the NY times crossword puzzle blog, someone mentioned the wooden acting in the library scene in Gone With the Wind. That produced a bevy of comments. Another person speculated that I might have some thoughts on that subject. As it happens . . .
When I used to work the Southern California Renaissance Faire™, at one point I became interested in stage acting and got involved with a group called A Crye of Players. That got me looking closely at the way Shakespear wrote his plays. It dawned on me that the Elizabethan actors employed what I would call the "Itsey Bitsey Spider" school of acting. Something more like Ian McNiece's form of oration as the News guy in the HBO series Rome. His gestures come, perhaps, from Aristotle's The Art of Rhetoric. Ther is very little stage direction beyond entrances and exunts in Shakespear's plays.
In high school, my girlfriend and I did the "Good morrow Kate" scene from Taming of the Shrew. We were told to ham it up and have a lot of fun by the teacher. For the life of me, as a high school student, I couldn't figure out what she meant, Nothing was called for by the script. Well, maybe a little tongue waggling at the line: "What, with my tongue in your tail?" Which line had been omitted from our prepared script handed out by the school. We got a paperback copy of the play as I'd managed to lose mine so we added the line back and got the only laugh from the class (and a gasp from the teacher, Mrs. Schwimley) when we did the performance. I have seen that scene performed in many ways since, mostly as slapstick buffoonery which I just don't get. Sure, it makes the scene visually interesting but most of the grabbing, tugging and pulling just seem to run contrary to the expectations of a first meeting between a man and a woman.
From my RenFaire days I also knew that there was no TV or radio for entertainment and music, unless one made it for oneself, was difficult to come by. The main evening entertainment, say around the dinner table, was conversation, the wittier the better. In Shakespear, most of the really good action takes place off stage and is reported by actors dashing on stage. I submit, Shakespear's theater was primarily conversational. Really, really dull to a modern audience unless they are lovers of rhetoric, poetry and language generally.
I've heard actors swear that Hamlet's "Speak the speech, I pray you . . . " speech advocates something akin to Method Acting, I just don't buy it.
I'm not going to go into performance practices in the intervening years because I haven't studied them. I'm going to jump to moving pictures. Simply put, silent movies were all about pantomime. The characters couldn't talk so they had to express the dialogue through gesture and "body language". Not very convincing forms of acting though early audiences, being rather naive, ate it up. Perhaps the very best actors of that era were Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keeton with their deadpan performances.
With the advent of talkies, the overstated gestures and postures slowly melted away. Eventually, Konstantin Stanislavsky and his method turned up. The Actor's Studio, espousing Stanislavsky's teachings, soon followed. This gave actors the ability to try out new things without the pressure of commercial productions. Acting began slowly to improve but not every actor embraced the "Method".
I remember reading and article written by Richard Burton about his love for Elizabeth Taylor and how much he learned from her. During the filming of Cleopatra, Burton was being very much the stage actor. In scenes he played with Liz, he would think that she wasn't doing any acting at all and that the results weren't going to be very good. Later, watching the rushes, he felt she had blossomed. Eye movements and tiny ticks in closeups spoke volumes to him and he began tempering his acting accordingly.
Many actors had stage experience then, the early days of the talkies. Gone With the Wind was made in 1939, twelve years after the advent of the talkies and ten years before the creation of the Actor's Studio. It is no wonder that some of the acting was a bit wooden. It has taken many years for films to reach the present level of sophistication in acting. The actor's needed to learn and the directors too. The current crop of performers have an entirely different set of examples to draw from.
As Yoda might say, "There is no acting, only doing."
