The art of sound pictures (1930)

THE BUYER’S PROBLEMS 39 the War, were either indifferent to it or thoroughly disgusted. It lacked the peculiar values which it genuinely possessed for older people who went through the horrors of war and had to find extravagant relief or else go mad. The next victim of the editor’s hostility is a story about a white man who wakes up one morning in a cheap little hotel on an island in the South Seas, finding that he has been drugged and robbed by some men on board the boat which brought him to the port. The hotel is run by a mother and daughter. The latter has run away from her husband, who was one of the men who robbed our hero. The hero lives with this girl for quite a while, until a half-caste damsel comes to work for them and discovering that hero and heroine are not married, decides to capture the hero for herself. Then develops, somewhat briefly, a very intense South Sea Island triangle. At this stage of the proceedings, a long series of wild adventures has begun, in which one of the women is captured and carried off by islanders. The hero and the other woman set out in pursuit to rescue her. This story has two weaknesses, one of which is that the public has already had too many South Sea Island stories. The other difficulty lies in the plot itself. The first half of the action turns entirely around the highly erotic schemes of the half-caste woman to capture the man. This appeals to one very large audience. The second half of the action is almost entirely adventure, full of hunts, mysterious hiding places, savage tribes, storms at sea, and several attempted murders. This interests a wholly different audience. If the two halves were woven together carefully into a unified whole, this double appeal would prove advantageous. But the author