The cinema : 1952 (1952)

YOUR CRITIC RIGHT OR WRONG ! I49 apparently all those closely connected with the world of films fall for. They cannot accept that films are only another form of human activity and that the people in them are mostly there by accident as indeed so many other people are in other walks of life. They have the same feelings, the same loves and the same hates. In fact, I think that everybody closely enmeshed in films, or any other show business, leads a life of drama from morning to night and himself plays the leading part. They rush to defend what needs no defence and attack violently the non-existent. I find it difficult to see that there is any fundamental difference between the film critic, the literary critic, the music critic or the art critic. Just like the subject they write about, some are good and some are bad. It is true that there have only been film critics for perhaps fifty years, but there has been criticism since history began. I cannot therefore see that the lack of tradition of the film itself is of very much importance. I find one outstanding virtue and one outstanding vice in most film critics. They are, as far as my experience goes, incorruptible, despite the fact they are wined and dined more than the normal critics. I do not believe one of them says what he does not think. The world to which they are attached has the right and deliciously vulgar approach to publicity. They find it difficult to believe that the limelight and the attention of the glamorous and the beautiful can leave the critic unmoved. But it does and for the most part leaves them neither impressed nor soured. The vice which worries me is that very few of them indeed love their trade. Trade I think is an unfair word. I mean they do not really love films for their own sake. The majority are trained and expert journalists, hired by newspaper proprietors to work on their papers. Only by accident have many of them come to be critics of films. When they have