Cinema Progress (1935 - 1937)

CINEMA PROGRESS How Moral are the Movies? By Dr. Edwin D. Starbuck* The motion pictures: Cultivate and dignify the art appreciation of the public. Encourage peace and enhance beauty in the midst of the necessity of portraying the ugly and coarse. Depict the gangster as what he is instead of as a hero. Are on the up-grade in their quality of presentation. But — they also: Err in their treatment of murder and the value of human life, respect for law, and ideal love. Resort to sensory and sensuous appeals, the use of melodrama, and a type of humor that is perhaps not funny except to persons of low taste. Create false social standards, and Violate Art in the interest of Success. Such were some of the conclusions of 200 summer session students at the University of Southern California, when asked recently in a questionnaire to evaluate the good and bad qualities of a social force which affects 40,000,000 Americans weekly. Just how much people are really being influenced is open to question, but the theme is so important that none can escape the challenge to think into it as soberly and as clearly as possible. There can be no doubt that motion pictures are stealing the cultural show. Of the 40,000,000 persons who jam into the theaters every week, there are 11 ,000,000 youngsters under 14, more than twice that many youths in the 'teens, and an uncounted throng of grown-ups. There probably is nothing in all history to match this invasion. ♦Professor of philosophy, University of Southern California. « Why has the cinema such a tremendous hold over the citizenry of the world? It is because "we think with our muscles," as one of the nation's leading psychologists has put it. We respond with our entire organism to the appeal of a shadow world — not only with the skeletal muscles that have to do with action and reaction, but with the smooth or visceral muscles involved in breathing, digestion, glands, and blood circulation. It is the genius of the motion picture art, appropriating as it does the techniques and appeals of nearly all the other arts to strike straight into the basal urges and drives — the raw stuff of which personality consists. Possibly never has there been a wider door of opportunity flung open to a human agency than that enjoyed by the cinema. But is filmdom rising to that opportunity? Is its program toward better art and finer living? Unfortunately, we do not know. None of the prolific writings on the subject and the researches made have been objective. Student reaction, however, indicates that the scales balance neatly in quite a number of items. The cinema does and does not break down racial prejudice, dignify marriage and the family, cultivate right social attitudes, approve toughness and rudeness in settling difficulties, and use the tragic and terrible to accentuate gentler and nobler qualities. It seemed to this wTriter there might be some value in obtaining a crosssection picture of the opinions of a group of cultivated persons, part of whom have lived close to the moving 5 —