Letters About Films

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 421, 18 July 1947, Page 33

Letters About Films

Sir,-I side solidly with Phil Hayward. Far from being finished, Disney is at the begnning of a marvellous art form in which he has no equals. Each of his efforts have had extraordinary beauty and appeal in different ways. The trouble lies not with Walt Disney, but with those poorly equipped to comprehend the exquisite and _ poetical. would-be intellectuals sneer at "Silly symphony culture,’ and machineage creation. It is a foolish kind of narrowness, for original mind and idealistic inspiration are the source of this art just as of all others. Disney the poet, musician, and seer is far beyond the little zone of his critics. . . . One does S Need to have any "axes to grind" My'see that many American films are often better than other imports. It is nothing but snobbishness and affectation to favour foreign pictures. Another kind of affectation is the mania for English pictures; no matter how gauche, lurid, trashy these may be, they are invariably hailed with exaggerated fuss. Without doubt, many of them are frightfully poor. People must learn to be sensible about movie art; a film is not necessarily meretricious because it’s from Hollywood, or inevitably artistic and brilliant (and cultural) because it’s from Paris or London. Occasional Continental efforts are well done, but production is frequently clumsy, with plots hashed from plays; and the attitude to sex is always the same both in British and foreign films, either bawdy or vicious, the tired roué attitude. Sex in American films is mostly treated in gay and youthful style and with a refreshing pride in the state of love, as if it were good instead of decadent. Critics are fond of harping on the bad influence of American films. I would like to know what kind of influence in the moral way they think British films exude; the majority produced between 1945 and 1947 were on themes of rape, adultery, sadism, debauchery, and murder. I would like to add one point which I think has not been sufficiently "stressed; the, pleasant fact with American films of being able to see men who look and talk like males. In English films they attitudinize like

dummies.

LET'S BE HONEST

(Lower Hutt).