Difference

The Heroine is despondent. She sits at the window of her drab abode, contemplating suicide. The organ of the cinema house plays Tchaikovsky's Pathetique or something equally lugubrious and appropriate. But, hark! A knock on the door! The organist changes quickly into some gay lilt by Mendelssohn. It is the Hero, or a telegram from him, just in time. The Heroine does not leap to her death. Everything ends happily--in the movies. Now that the "talkies" have come, you can actually hear that situation-saving knock on the door. And nowadays the organ music or the orchestration is part of the film, so that the "emoting" of cinema's musical accompaniments is more exactly timed and appropriate than ever. Now that the talkies have come, more than 35,000 musicians who used to play in theatres are out of their jobs (TIME, May 27 et seq.). The orchestra of Loew's big New York Theatre, for example, was dismissed last fortnight.

For three years past, the assistant organist of that orchestra had been one Helen Jean Moyer, 29. Last week she kept looking for another job, but found none. She went to her drab abode and sat by the window, despondent. She thought about suicide. The "talkies" have come, but Organist Moyer heard no knock on her own door. She waited awhile and then jumped, twelve stories down to death. The movies, the talkies, real life--they are quite different.