CHILDREN AND FILMS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 323, 31 August 1945, Page 5

CHILDREN AND FILMS

Sir,-I sympathise with "Small Fry" in her dislike of having children’s entertainment filched from them, for I can remember back to a childhood where cinema played no part. If the presentday children were set down in the same environment, picture theatres would have to close on Saturday afternodns, though I suspect that if the children of those: days were placed into a presentday child’s environment the {children’s courts would have to increase a hundredfold and would have to work day and night. ; I doubt if cinema entertainment can compensate for any of those lost freedoms, but "Small Fry" perhaps thinks so and that the present programmes are adequate. She is entitled to her opinion, but in condemning indiscriminately those who want them improved she does not realise that she is depriving other children of entertainment, for there are children (and many of them) who prefer the better type of picture. | A correspondent writing on radio serials points out that the undiscerning listener would probably enjoy a better serial as much as an inferior one, and I am sure that is doubly true in regard to children. I have never heard the rowdiest audience of children caterwauling a picture of any merit. What seems significant to me is that the child who reads trash and frequents unde: sirable pictures, saved probably by love of drama, can still appreciate the good and, truthful and beautiful when it comes his way; but it is the adolescent who suffers When this ‘undeveloped or thwarted imagination and dramatic sense deteriorates into a love of the sensational and the inability. to make the effort required to appreciate hetter

things

TICK TACK

(Dunedin).