Celluloid : the film to-day (1931)

$2 CELLULOID perpendicular thrust of its skyscrapers. Films of achievement and human endeavour are plentiful. The opening up of the Great West or the building of an industry are frequent excuses for entertainment. Cimarron alone is a marvellous advertisement for American enterprise, with its city arriving overnight, a transition from wooden huts to gigantic business bastions in the space of a few years — America ! The Virginian, Fighting Caravans, The Great Meadow, Hell's Heroes and The Santa Fe Trail are further cases in point. Each one of these films, released all over America, England and the British Empire, is showing that America is a growing nation ever striving to achieve greater and bigger things through work and energy. Such incidental propaganda may be advantageous as far as it goes, but on the other hand many films from Hollywood are stamped with the chaotic sentiments which characterize that amazing city which possesses no ideology. A great number of American films fail to be a proper crystallization of public sentiment because the social influences of Hollywood are entirely undirected. It is a widely accepted fact that there exists an immense lack of social understanding throughout America, and I have heard it stated that if the American public is ever to be brought to any degree of culture, it will perforce be through the medium of the movie. But the astonishing conflict of ideas, the medley of social strata, and the tangled oudooks of such a polyglot production-centre as Hollywood are quite unfitted to vouchsafe the making of such films. Unmistakable proof of this false social understand