Celluloid : the film to-day (1931)

54 CELLULOID the most technically interesting. It is an argument for individualism run riot, for infidelity of mind, for complete sacrifice of principles and scruples for personal advantage. It holds up a news-editor, utterly unprincipled and crooked, but so charmingly played that he invites our admiration. The same remarks apply to Scandal Sheet, in which even when proved a murderer the editor of George Bancroft is a " good guy." In both cases we are being asked to admire a murderer. Further instances of this incidental, undirected but dangerous propaganda abound. Although probably oblivious of the fact, the gorgeous-minded Cecil B. de Mille produced some excellent Bolshevik propaganda in the first half of Dynamite. Mamoulian's brilliantly directed City Streets is shattering in its stark barbarity of gangster life. Perhaps the only commendable background propaganda to emanate from Hollywood is the Western film, for the simple reason that in these open-air pictures the Americans are dealing with environments and social values which they thoroughly understand. Moreover, the backgrounds of desert and pine-trees and horses are uncontaminated by the distorted attitudes of Hollywood's production-executives, despite the enforced intrusion of sophisticated cowboys and heroines from New York City. The Western, exemplified in The Virginian, is the truest and most sincere form of American incidental propaganda. The boundary lying between this background propaganda film and the film specifically sponsored as an advertisement is difficult to fix with any exactitude unless the facts are available in each case. But there