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Timely Topics
A T a time like the present, when ^ each headline and broadcast brings its new tale of earth-shaking events, it is only natural that to many of us the production of motion pictures should seem suddenly trivial. But in a larger sense, the exact opposite is true. However strongly we may feel about the events taking place on the other side of the Atlantic, we can do nothing to alter their outcome.
But we have an opportunity to render an invaluable service to the world by swinging the force of our united efforts into the making of better, more entertaining pictures.
The trade papers tell us that a vast part of our foreign market has been blacked out, and that domestic audiences are drastically slashed as thousands of Americans stay home to follow the war news with newspapers and radio. But beyond this, our own reactions as we avidly follow the latest bulletins tell us of a world with nerves racked to the limit. All of us, whether in warring or neutral nations, are living, working and sleeping with our nerves on edge.
Such tension cannot continue indefinitely. Regardless of the outcome of the great events we are following, all of us must sooner or later relax that tension. We will demand something to offset it — to give our frayed nerves a chance to escape from the day’s horrible realities.
Motion pictures offer the fullest form of such escape known to our time. It is inevitable, therefore, that
when that tension breaks, whether it is because the dangers causing the tension have abated, or merely because outraged human nature can endure no more, motion picture entertainment will be in greater demand than ever before.
But when that demand comes, it must he met with the kind of pictures that will offer a satisfactory escape for war-frayed nerves. People whose nerves have been rubbed raw by the realities of a world at war will demand entertainment that gives them an utter change of scene and thought. They'll want less of grim and heavy drama, no matter how “timely” or how magnificently produced and acted; they'll want more light and frothy romance, comedy and music. Especially may they he expected to want music-films: showmen of our acquaintance who served overseas during the last war have repeatedly told us that in Paris and London, no matter howr the tide of war turned, the musichalls never lacked for packed audiences; in our own country, some of the most successful musicals were produced during our own war years. Human nature doesn’t change: the same type of entertainment that offered forgetfulness to war-strained nerves in 1914-18 can repeat in 1940.
Very clearly, it is up to Hollywood to anticipate that need, and to produce the pictures that will satisfy it. Let us hope that the Hollywood which after so many years of bickering over actually pointless questions of internal
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