FILMS AND WAR

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21176, 27 July 1940, Page 13 (Supplement)

FILMS AND WAR

COMPLAINT FROM LONDON AUDIENCES WANT COMEDIES I know you’re furious with your local cinemas, says a writer in a London paper. You complain, with justification, that at a time when the war news is so grave that in return for your ninepence you want to see comedies to raise a laugh, something to take your mind off things—you are being offered such grim, death-streaked epics as “Drums Along the Mohawk,” “Tower of London,” “The Roaring Twenties,” and the war drama, “Contraband.” It is understandable that your antagonism should be directed against the manager of your local cinema, whether the theatre belongs to a circuit or is rated as an independent. Yet it is not his fault. He would rather be playing comedies. Believe me, it would mean better business. But the dramas were booked months ago, when it was impossible to predict that total warfare would be raging now. Neither is it the fault of Hollywood or British studios. When they made the films you complain about, there seemed to be nothing likely to happen on the Western Front. You, the cinema-going public, were, at the time, bored with the war, and, in the nature of things, demanded action drama on the screen. Screen Tastes Revolutionised And how were studios or cinema proprietors to know that at dawn on Friday, May 10, Hitler, by his invasion of the Low Countries, was to revolutionise your screen tastes in an hour or two and turn you from drama to comedy. The principal trouble, of course, is that there are no good comedies available. British studios from which the best screen laughs have always come have for a score of war reasons been reduced to almost complete inactivity. What a box-office smash there would be if only cinemas could suddenly give you the Crazy Gang, plus Will Hay, plus Moore Marriott and Graham Moffatt, plus George Formby and Max Miller—in a story devoted entirely to the throwing of custard pies and with no reference to the war. And there would be nobody giving the film louder laughter than the boys on leave.