ESCAPE BY THE STALLS ENTRANCE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 159, 10 July 1942, Page 10

ESCAPE BY THE STALLS ENTRANCE

Are The Movies Really Doing Their Job? ECENTLY "The Listener" published extracts from a speech in New York by the famous film producer Cecil B, de Mille, in which he spoke about the responsibility of the cinema in these times. This week instead of reviewing any new pictures-he says there are none worth reviewing anyway-our film critic, "G.M.," examines and comments on some aspects of de speech. .

O doubt Cecil B. de Mille really believed what he said when he declared that the task of the cinema at present is that of "helping to bring home a full realisation of this crisis" and of "holding high and ever visible the values that everyone is fighting for." But is this true? If this is the cinema’s job, is it giving much, sign of doing it? I should like very much to believe that it is, but regretfully I can’t. The values the cinema upholds are still largely those of the bargain basement. I'll start my offensive with a flanking movement. The other day at lunch three of us had a discussion on the modern novel which lasted right through the stew and well after the coffee. One of the party, not such a cynic as you might imagine, challenged the other two of us to name one memorable modern novel which was not written in a spirit of disillusionment-one book, part from the pot-boilers, in which those characters who deserved it lived happily ever after,,in which the wicked were confounded and the righteous rewarded. And we couldn’t do it-though perhaps you, suffering less from the dulling effects of stew and cream cakes, may be able to. And since the characters of the average modern novel were now so frequently left in the mess of their author’s creation, there was not much escape for the reader either. Now I am not prepared to follow this argument much further. It has brought me round to the position that I wanted on the flank. It is possible, and I am half inclined to think quite probable, that the stew and the news about Tobruk both lay so heavy on our spirits that we were exaggerating the gloom of modern fiction. But this conversation set me to thinking about the cinema. Is there any parallel? Let me say at once that I don’t think there is. If you cannot find escape by way of the library shelf, you can certainly still find it by way of the stalls entrance (or the circle entrance, for that matter, if you can afford it, but not many escape addicts can). Dope at one and six a dose.: Despite the grimness of the times and the need for straight and ruthless thinking — or possibly just because of this — the cinema is still the great purveyor of pipe-dreams; is just as, much c ed with superficialities and evasion real issues as it has ever been: The excep-

tions to this rule-the few Dead. Ends and Informers which have made some genuine attempt to depict reality and achieve integrity — only serve to make the rule more obvious. AM not one who takes delight in decrying the cinema, who scoffs at it on principle. It is my hobby and has to some extent been my life’s interest, and I am always ready to hurl a metaphorical ink-pot at the head of any intellectual snob who sneers at the movies as a perversion. But neither am I blind to my darling’s faults. It is just because I am sure that the screen’ has great possibilities that I am positive it has hardly even begun to realise them. And I sometimes wish that .the cinema would give me a bit more help in this job of championing it, by producing a few more films like The Grapes of Wrath, Dead End, Fury, Citizen Kane, Mayerling. The Informer, and Un Carnet de Bal, to toss over into the enemy’s trenches. For the champions of the cinema are running dangerously short of ammunition! The very fact that I can so easily remember and glibly rattle off a few outstanding titles shows how desperately few they are-few, that is, by comparison with all the shoddy, mass produced things turned out five or six a week from the sausage machines of Hollywood and England. It may be consoling but it is not really helpful to know that in the literary world the Ethel M. Dells, the Annie S. Swans, and the Dennis Wheatleys have an output about ten times greater than the Hemingways, the Steinbecks, and the Dos Passos people, Ten times? Yes, but the dope kings of Hollywood do it a hundredfold. So one grasps at a possible excuse: that the screen is a very much younger and less experienced art than literature, and one must expect gaucherie and a preoccupation with superficial and trivial things in the intellectually immature. Well, there is perhaps some comfort to be taken from that line of thought; but you daren’t follow it too far. For if you do you soon find yourself up against that blankest of intelleétual stonewalls-the perfectionist theory. Just leave the cinema alone to develop in its own way, and in God’s good time everything will be just perfect. You mustn’t hope for perfection now, but if you will just wait till some happy future day a miracle will happen and de Millennium will be laid right in your lap. ; ‘(Continued on next page)

(Continued from previous page) The devil it will! We shan’t get better films any more than we’ll get a better social order or a better way than war for settling disputes just by waiting for them. We've got to protest about the rubbish we’re still getting and make it quite plain that we want something better and won’t be satisfied till we get it. So my particular protest-and I hope yours, too, if you have any strong feelings about the importance of the cinema -is against the continuing escapism and futility of the great majority of films, their almost complete lack of integrity and of relevance to the world in which they are produced. With few exceptions, the films of the past 10 years or so have been about as much related to those years as some of the communiqués about Malaya and Libya were related to fact. O, I am not arguing that all films should Mean Something, should have some Social or Propagandist Purpose; of arguing, for ifistance, that in a world at war, all films should be war films. I am enough of an escapist to believe that we are already getting quite enough socalled war pictures, and to view with some alarm the prospect of bayonets and bombers figuring more and more prominently in every unit of our movie programmes, from the shorts to the feature. At the same time, I hope I am also enough of a realist to believe that the social order (or disorder) which produced the war should get some emphasis, and not merely the actual fighting. Here is a whole civilisation in flux, and all the interlocking causes and effects, especially the thousand and one personal problems and relationships of our everyday life, often trivial and amusing, but always human and real, should be the chief material of our screen entertainment. Yet to Hollywood, and to a large extent to the British studios also, the war is still too much just a kind of huge romantic adventure, rather than the

climax of a world-wide catastrophe, a background of titanic tragedy against which the common people, whether in uniform or out of it, carry on lives that can never be the same again. Our leading film producers, indeed, still seem to be preoccupied with the idea of the status quo, and this is shown by the fact that the characters of such a vast number of films remain, as they have always been, the members of a rich and leisured class, sipping cocktails, living in luxury flats, and making love to other people’s husbands and wives. Are these the "values that everyone is fighting for"? Or dope at one and six a dose? For in all these films what makes them such a powerful narcotic for the addict who seeks escape by the stalls entrance is the apparently inherent promise that all these romantic adventures and all this luxurious living may one day come his own way. It is because just as many films as ever before seem designed to make us contented with our fate that I think we should regard them as being almost as sinister as they are silly.