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FILM MORALS
Since the days of the kinetoscope penny peep-shows the films have been a never-ending source of incitement to the moral crusader. And naturally so. In them he sees reflected and brought to a magnified focus the many worldly impertinences responsible for his reformatory itch. If his efforts to elevate the movies are as yet without observable results, he is nevertheless perhaps entitled to the credit for such restraint as now and again tempers their Hollywoodian bounce and ribaldry. At all events, they have given him and continue to give him a vast deal of concern on behalf of humanity in general and of youth in particular.
This concern finds its latest expression in the disclosures of an American organization, the Motion Picture Research Council. For the past four years it has devoted itself to a survey of the influence of the films on children and adolescents, and its findings are now in course of publication. These are so extensive that it will require no less than ten large volumes to hold them. The first of the series, Our Movie-Made Children, under the imprint of the Macmillan Company, is already at hand and presents in popular, journalistic vein a prefatory summing up of the full technical report of the council.
To accept the inferences and conclusions educible from the bristling contents of this epitome, is to be convinced that the movies are an instrument of the devil designed to pervert or undermine the moral, mental and nervous health of our children. Were this the first time the sprouting generation has been thus threatened through the enticements of a mischievous invention, the present indictment of the cinema might well be viewed with alarm. But experience has taught us otherwise and calms us with the assurance that we have here in the situation of the moment neither novelty nor undue menace. The outcry against the cinema is but today's recension of a story already venerable in the days of Hammurabi.
The quite-to-be-expected circumstance that certain of our youngsters are unwholesomely and even perniciously affected by the movies needs no multiplied volumes of statistics to carry conviction. Humanity is never without its proportion of neurotic and proclivitous offspring, susceptible through one means or another to wayward influences in thought or behaviour. Children of this type who are today thus deflected by Hollywood films of crime and amorosity are but the emotional duplicates of those of a less literal yesterday who were similarly led awry by Old Testament stories of like character.
Nevertheless, the moralistic challengers of the cinema are in a measure justified. The films may not have the widespread baneful influence attributed to them, but certainly in no respect are they commendable as exemplars of virtue or good manners. This is not because their stories are built upon moral deviations, for so also are the scriptures of the world, tut because we see these deviations too often invested with glamour and always