Cinema Quarterly (1933 - 1934)

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SYNTHETIC AMERICA ERIC M. KNIGHT Film Critic of ''The PJiiladclphia Public Ledger" As I sit in one of our American movie palaces, with the de luxe plush seats providing some minor balm, and watch the latest enamelled epic of American life and times float past in superficial perfection, I often wonder what the rest of the world is going to think of that picture. I wonder: "Do the girls in West Ham think we are like that? Do the lads in Lancashire imagine they are seeing us? Will Bordeaux and Mantua and Bombay and Melbourne come to the conclusion that America is as Hollywood shows it?" It is almost with a shock that I realize that, of course, they must accept us as we show ourselves by now ; the steady output of years must have convinced the world that the United States is much as it is shown on the films. Horrible thought! I rush to advise you that it isn't true — any more than the old conceptions about Frenchmen with pointed moustaches and high hats, Russians with beard ^ and blouses, and Mexicans with knives and sneers. May I point out that few lands know how to tell the truth about themselves. To reverse the medallion, let me announce that British films have failed, with monotonous regularity, to tell the rest of the world the truth about Britain. We've had, true enough, talking photographs of lots of your actors — who, I suppose, are the exact equivalent of our Broadway lads. What picture of Britain do they bring us? They, those actors, appear to us like a lot of top-hatted silly asses of exactly the type that Americans delight to scorn. Have you ever sent us a picture that would allow an American to see a bit of Britain as you yourselves know it? Possibly Grierson's Drifters did; we have not seen that here. There was an Anthony Asquith short film which, for a brief moment, caught up some of the colour of a mist-draped moor. Beyond that, nothing! An American would need to visit Britain to find that it is not a country of pseudo-modernistic sets that look remarkably like our own just-asshiny plasterwork from Hollywood. Similarly, I should say that of all the great outpouring of American cinedramas not one in a hundred bears any grain of truth in its warped outlook. You see only cardboard conventions distorted with grease-paint outlooks; crooked cops, blatant gunmolls, senti 87