Cinema Quarterly (1933 - 1934)

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mental detectives, face-slapping tough guys, saccharine-sentimented vaudeville heroes, wise-cracking gold-diggers, impudent youth, gorgeously gowned shopgirls. That, my friends, is not America. Art is a parallel to truth, and there is much truth in the United States, truth that needs telling. For it is not monotonous, this live America you never see. It is alive, vivid and interesting. Moreover, this being a large country, it is variegated in its colour. We have here the rolling valleys of the East, with the country people who ride and hunt much as in your own counties ; we have the granite-strewn farms and hard accents of stern New England ; the narrow monotony of the "Baptist belt5 of the near Middle West ; the South, where dedacence and newly awakened life battle bitterly ; the awesome flat lands and flat life of the wheat-belt ; the semitropical vegetation and the hothouse ideas of California ; the grime of Pennsylvania coal-fields, with bloody conflicts between miners and bosses; the tragic bleakness of manufacturing cities; the pure architecture of little old towns ; the Creole overlay of New Orleans — I could go on for pages. These, all widely variant, are the real America you do not see in American films — much to the despair of the sane and normal citizens of this land, who have deep and generous affection for their country. There is not a phase of the "programme" film that manages to clutch at truth beyond that wise-crackery of the Broadway hanger-on which must, to you, seem typical American stuff. Even the music, such as it is, has no American quality to it — and by American I mean inherently belonging to this land. There is much jazz (which doesn't get into screen musicomedy), which is negroid. But the music you get in Hollywood films is almost purely Russian-Jewish. Meet our Berlins and Jolsons and Cantors and then you see it all — you know why — the minor wail, the crying blue, the " Mammy v caterwauling that springs from Jewish matriarchworship. American songs really American? Not any more than a cantor's chanting is British. If you want real American songs we have them by the dozen. There is "Oh Suzannah," "Arkansas Traveller," 'Money Musk," "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie," "The Old Rock Candy Mountain," "Clementine." Dozens of native tunes that are part of the nation's life are unused. In practically every part of the United States I have heard a song which starts: My son Joshua, went to Philadelphia. It is as well known, I should say, as "The Star-Spangled Banner." Yet it lies unrecorded. Or there is the plaintive charm of the real cowboy songs, such as "The Last Roundup," with its curiously intricate rhythm and its exhortation to: 88