About Films

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 475, 30 July 1948, Page 12

About Films

PF OOTNOTES TO FILM is an extremely welcome addition to the 4YA programmes. The listener who "never goes to the pictures" must surely be in a very small minority nowadays, but, if he exists, I advise him to listen to this feature. What I may call the intelligent filmgoer, of course, will be listening anyhow; criticisms and reviews of forthcoming films are not so much a feature of his everyday life that he can afford to miss hearing what other intelligent filmgoers have to say. It is a happy innovation if it may be assumed that films reviewed here will be those we have not as yet seen in Dunedin. There is something very annoying about missing a good film for lack of a preliminary review, and something even more annoying about having to sit through a poor film for lack of preliminary criticism of its weak points. There is, of course, a third type of listener, the chronic filmgoer, who out of boredom with his home surroundings and pursuits chooses to attend two or three films a week, not bothering to select any particular film but just "going to the flicks’-any old flicks-and who usually can’t remember

what the name of the film was, let alone who produced or directed it. But I am afraid that the Average Filmgoer is one and the same person as the Average Listener; that he doesn’t use his radio any more intelligently than his cinema; and that he won't be likely to hear Footnotes to Film unless he just happens to be actively listening when it just happens to be tuned in.