MODERN ENTERTAINMENT

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 April 1939, Page 2

MODERN ENTERTAINMENT

INDIFFERENCE OF THE YOUNG. One of the. trials of those who are getting on in life is the indifference of the young. One can understand and even sympathise with ignorance; it is the indifference which hurts, writes Mr Richard Prentis in “John O’London’s Weekly.” The other day I had a letter which began: “Dear Mr Prentis, —Why must you bore us with continual jabber about Rachel, Bernhardt, Druse. Irving, Ellen Terry? Can’t you realise that to the people of my generation all these are nothing but a bunch of stiffs?" The remainder of the letter sought to interest me in the achievements of Mr Robert Taylor and Miss Deanna Durbin. I have a further complaint against youth, which is not that it doesn’t know, but doesn’t want to know. No reasonable person objects to the philosophy of “apres moi le deluge.” What the young people of today are saying is: “Avant nous le deluge!” Implying that nothing happened till they were born. This, of course, means the end of culture. What our young folk cannot realise is the quite incredible badness of modern entertainment. Within half an hour of writing this I shall sally forth to see and hear a musical comedy. I know beforehand that the music will consist of one sickly tune repeated over and over, again with perhaps two and a-half others. When I was a young man there w were enough tunes in, say, “The Belle of New York,” to go round five of today’s musical comedies. And there is more real music in any one Gilbert and Sullivan opera than Mr Coward, Mr Cole Porter, Mr Jerome Kern, or Mr Vivian Ellis have composed in the whole of their lives. It is the inability of youth to recognise this which makes age so crabbed. I shall reconsider the foregoing when somebody shall take me to a film showing Mr Fred Astaire and Miss Ginger Rogers in which there is more than one tune and a-quarter. The trouble with the age as we older people see it’ is that it makes more fuss about less talent than ever before.