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What other film rang true? I suggest another: State Fair. Despite all the fake backgrounds, dunning shots and duped scenes concocted in Hollywood, this one almost caught the narrowness of Middle W'estern life. The live-stock contests, the canning awards, the tawdry amusement booths, the trotting-horse races, were getting close to the soil. If the picture wanted to get even closer it should have included those curious and distinctly American contests of hawg-calling and rolling-pin throwing. The first of those is won by the person whose dulcet yowls can call home a herd of hogs from the greatest distance; the second, open only to women, is judged more for accuracy than for mileage. Silly stuff? Outlandish, I admit. But that's what the people do, and I can't see that it's any sillier than rating the dexterity with which a man can beat rhythms with the tips of his shoes — or sing about his mammy as he kneels on one knee.
There is one more picture that is American and alive: the recently issued She Done Him Wrong, by Mae West, for Mae West and with Mae West. I wonder how I can explain her. I suppose the easiest way is to say that East is East and West is something else again.
Mae West has swept across the country. Will Hays ruled that she couldn't make a film called Diamo?id Lil, so she made a film in which she was Diamond Lou and issued it as a rose by another name. (Thus we obey Hays.)
But it isn't the story that means anything. It is Mae West herself: beautiful, vulgar, plump and earthy. She has poundage and charm and a worldly-wise air. But it is her frank vulgarity that attracts. The very walk of her, the lift of a shoulder, are eloquently suggestive. And is this America? In part it is. At least, it is closer to the truth. So America goes wild over the woman. She upsets the silly cardboard convention that a woman is something with a Hollywood diet and a lamp-post silhouette. For once, instead of a mannikin, there is a real woman on the screen, as real as Marie Dressier and half her age. It is astounding — someone alive on the screen!
Mae West is not all America. She is a part, but a real part. We need the other parts revealed as eloquently — the millhand and miner and automobile-worker and farmer and oil-driller and cottoncropper.
We are not a land of vaudeville actors, and it is only because vaudeville actors play so much a part of Hollywood life that Hollywood thinks they are life itself. There is a great America here — an America which, strange as it may seem to film watchers, is warm and alive, full of people whose feet are planted deeply in this land of ours. I'd like you to see them. But you won't. Not from feature films. If you want to see America, take it from the news-reels.
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