CINEMA OF TODAY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 April 1938, Page 9

CINEMA OF TODAY

FACING A GRAVE CRISIS. e The cinema today is facing a crisis as grave as any in its history, writes Miss C. A. Lejeune, the film critic, in the London “Observer.” Something has happened which can be set right only by sheer hard thinking and intelligent action. The cinema and the public have been jogging along together for more than a-quarter of a century now. During that time the public has grown up. The cinema has not. How much longer can such a companionship endure? The ideas of the cinema are, broadly speaking, the same today as they were at the time when Mary Pickford became the world’s sweetheart, and Theda Bara, the original “vamp,” was photographed squatting nonchalantly beside a skeleton. A great deal has happened in the world since then. War, depression, unemployment, political and social readjustment, and, above all, the march of scientific invention, which has suddenly made us free of the ether, telescoped space, and readjusted speed. I don’t say that there is no room for the sweetheart and the vamp in this latter-day cosmography, but I would point out that they are up against pretty strong competition from, say, the internal combustion engine. The trouble with motion picture producers is that they have not the least idea of the range of things that really interest the modern generation. Secure in their own superheated offices, they see nobody but their colleagues and employees, hear nothing but film talk, go nowhere except to the places where film people gather. They are engaged in providing entertainment for a public that they don’t know, have never known, and make not the slightest attempt to get to know. They should read the specialised magazines that are published every day of the week, on every subject, from zoology to aeronautics. They should spend a month or so in a mean street of a factory town. They should eat at popular restaurants, travel third class at the rush hour, talk to news agents, housewives, library assistants, schoolboys. If they do they will find out, better late than never, that fact as well as fiction is full of stories, and that Boy meets Girl is only one of them, and by no means the most dramatic. And therj they will be able to go back to the studios and make real pictures.