The cinema : 1952 (1952)

I50 THE CINEMA their holidays, another member of the same staff, who may well be a sporting writer or a literary critic, does their work. This is not calculated either to have the best influence on the public or on the film world itself. To me one of the outstandingly strange results of film criticism is that the people to whom it is primarily addressed i.e. the public, seem to take no notice of it. Generally speaking, the film succeeds by word of mouth publicity and not by praise or blame allocated by the press. It is the producers, the directors, the actors, the technicians as a rule who take criticism most seriously, and here you find the result is the same as in the other arts. Good critics eventually affect the subjects of their criticism and it is quite easy to trace historically the delayed action results. The work of the bad critic disappears as the work of all bad artists does. Obviously the mechanics of film criticism are different from those of others. Critics cannot take the film home and look at it ; they have to go to stated places at stated times, meet the same faces day after day, year in, year out. This must be a very hard trial. It is easier to forgive a film critic for his lack of love of films than it would be a literary critic for not loving books, but it nevertheless has a pernicious effect. It is only too easy to see by reading their criticisms that many times they are using it as a form of personal escape and that a 'smart crack5 affords them more pleasure than a reasoned argument. Perhaps the fact that they can rarely attach praise or blame to an* individual is responsible for this (though it must be admitted that critics of team-sports do not appear to be so affected). I have up to now spoken mostly of the daily and weekly critics. There is, of course, a quite large volume of criticism published from time to time by writers who have studied the subject for long periods and are not concerned with an