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346 PRESS CRITICISM A STUMBLING BLOCK
look lovely, or cute, or curious. Now he asks for a good story first, and second a deviation from the " mixture as before " on the part of his favourites.
One stumbling block to a greater advancement of the screen is that it lacks a high standard of criticism in Britain. With few exceptions its Press critics are drawn from the ranks of those writers who combine a lack of understanding of the motion picture medium with a lack of understanding of the public which is its audience.
Many of the critics come from the middle class and bring an easy Galsworthian pen to bear on the screen, unaware that the film itself is both an art form and an entertainment which, in catering for everyone, necessarily embraces millions upon millions of lowerincome-bracket wage earners as its most staunch patrons.
The standards of criticism applicable to the West End theatre cannot be helpful to the film makers. They are not catering merely for that polite, and often slightly seedy, section of the public which dusts the moth balls out of its fur tippet and makes an occasional foray to one of London's quiet West End theatres, but a workaday audience of millions who are impervious to the lightly playful comments of the critics and who demand solid information about a film.
There are all too many plot reviewers at work, those writers who, bereft of critical faculties, make a resume of the entire plot of the picture — as though plot were a primary consideration — and leave the reader with little desire to see the film because he now knows its situations, characters and climax in detail.
Only slightly to be preferred is the type of critic who grows more and more arch the older she gets (this kind of critic is usually a woman). Their reviews are sprinkled with " Mr." and " Miss " to mark playful disapproval : "I must admit that I have never been enchanted by Mr. Turhan Bey's smudge of a moustache and Miss Yvonne de Carlo's bee-sting pout," though a few lines lower down we find that Olivia de Haviland, who happens to better please the critic, has no prefix to her name.
Trivial ? Of course it is, but irritatingly archaic.
Then there is the mental-gymnast type, who thinks to amuse where it cannot inform by writing " Mr. Johnny Weismuller as Tarzan displays both his torso and his lack of vocabulary in his latest depiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs' famous muscle-bound hero, while Brenda Joyce, by no means the plainest of Janes, is surely the straightest and least nonsensical the ape man has ever