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352 FILMS OF THE FUTURE
Life is hard in the mills and the mines. Audiences in such places demand relief from drab surroundings, relief which does not tease a tired mind, relief which is funny and bright, saucy and gay or is melodramatic to such an extent that by sheer impact it gets its points over even to those who have been in a noisy mill all day ; the adolescents of the industrial areas crave beauty and romance, with lovers more handsome and dialogue more piquant than their more carefree cousins of the Southern counties demand. The erotic love story, the glittering glamour girl, the incredibly handsome hero — they all still have their millions of admirers in the drab working class districts. And the cinema industry supplies the demand.
The only thing that scares some distributing company is when the critics over-praise their films lest anyone in the industrial areas should be frightened away from a film. According to a national newspaper, the Rank organisation was so seriously worried over the laudatory notices that it got that, when Brief Encounter was shown in the provinces, it was advertised as being good " in spite of the wild praise of the London critics."
What, then, does the future hold for the film business ?
Given a more leisured public, a better housed public, a better educated public, a censor-free public, it can provide films of a quality even higher than its fairly high standard of to-day.
With more leisure, with easier run homes, and with a sharper edge to its perceptions, the public will itself feel the need of pictures possessed of wider horizons than is at present the case.
When the workaday public has time to sit back and think, when its films are accorded informed criticism, when film entertainment is freed of busybodies, then it will be prepared to accept more subtlety, deeper insight, cleverer character drawing and finer story points in its films than now.
British production, never before at such a high level of excellence, will then be able to do what the workers in its studios have always hoped that it would one day do, which is to both set and contribute to new cultural standards of an internationally acceptable order.
The jungle drums of jazz are dying away and the concert grand is beginning to fill the hall at last.
The garish colour lighting is dimming as the tabs open on a wider, brighter screen.
THE END