The educational screen (c1922-c1956])

June, 1923 Are the Movies Improving? 269 humanity, as portrayed in the stories filmed. Would we deliberately send our children out to associate by the hour with and get their inspirations in life from a moron who lived in the neighborhood? or a thief? or a drunkard? or a murderer? or a brute who beats up his family 01 kicks an animal for the pleasure, to him, of hurting? No, in real life, we lock up these types, these defectives and offenders against society, and keep our community safe from their contamination. How many of us see these types every day in real life? If such did live in our neighborhood, we would invoke the law or move away. No, the people around us are ordinary people like the rest of us. Criminals are put in jail and the mental defectives are confined where they can do no harm. We demand that they be put where they cannot contaminate our young people. We have been so drilled in the effects of being frightened by these creatures that a superstition has been handed down to us that our children can be marked for life if an expectant mother is frightened by encountering one of these horrifying creatures. We seem to have forgotten all our horror of these impressions and seem eager for our young people to see all kinds of harrowing scenes. At least that seems to be the theory on which the producers are working. (The Press Agent for Bell Boy 13 boasts that Douglas M'cLean had a badly shattered set of nerves when he finished making that picture.) The more they can frighten us, the happier they are, and they say, as they did about the old sex films, "We are giving the public what it wants." Peter B. Kyne is correct when he says that the producers are trying to shock the nervous system rather than to appeal to the heart. Recently at a performance I saw a woman of mature years sitting on the edge of her seat, holding her breath at the movie catastrophe about to occur, exclaiming "Oh! Oh! Oh!," when it seemed inevitable, clapping her hands silently when the hero came and averted it, laughing and crying by turns as the picture progressed. Some day they will take her out of a motion picture theatre a raving maniac and we will say, "Too bad! I wonder how it happened." The producers boast of these harrowing scenes which make mature men and women in the audience exclaim in fright. How much worse must be the effect on our young people. Other nations have fallen into decay and other civilizations passed away; shall we hasten to break down our own by undermining the nervous system of its youth? We believe the close-up of the brutalized faces and brutal deeds is one of the worst offenses of the feature films today. If ever we hope to end war, then this is no time to brutalize our young people. Nations have been known to brutalize their people by showing their children pictures of brutality and accustoming them to revolting sights. We do become brutalized by seeing brutality and having no chance to prevent it. Our senses are dulled and we can learn to take pleasure in it. When a man throws a stone at a cat, just for his delight in seeing the creature suffer, and the screen depicts his bestial grin — yea, even gives us a closeup of it in all its repulsiveness, then that kind of recreation for our young people needs not only to be censored, but condemned. The producers feel they have quieted the demand for censorship. That does not seem to be true. What they do not understand is that we have now realized that the kind of censorship administered generally which passes such things as I have been describing for our young people to see, is not true censorship. It has not brought clean and wholesome films to them. We need a different kind of censorship. The only gleam of hope that I see in the whole situation is that our boys and girls arc becoming bored to death with the kinds of films shown. They are more eager for our lists of approved films than the average person would suppose. They ask what there is that is worth seeing and refuse to go to the others. If the industry is not careful, it may lose the patronage of the young people and that would mean its certain death. Why does it not think it worth while to perfect some method by which young people will know what is worth while for them to see, the kinds of films that they really like to see. If we set ourselves up as a committee on better films and endorse such a film as Bella Donna for the family to see, our work would not long command much confidence. What would we think of our public librarian if she suggested that our children read "What Fools Men Are," or "The Secrets of Paris"? Or if the English teacher read "The Woman Who Fooled Herself," with the class? Or suppose a mother told you she had just bought a new book to read to the family the title of which is, "My Friend the Devil!" And how many of us would gather with members of our family or