Film and Radio Guide (Oct 1945-Jun 1946)

FILM AND RADIO GUIDE WILLIAM LEWIN, EDITOR June, 1946 Volume XII, No. 9 A Protestant Looks at Films BY PAUL F. HEARD Executive Secretary, Protestant Film Commission, Inc. The idea that most Hollywood feature films are “pure entertainment” and nothing more is sheer producer propaganda. Both in content and in technique, Hollywood feature films are designed, often with canny, diabolical insight, to refiect the public mind and the philosophy of life whereby people, often without admitting it even to themselves, really live. Often these films probe beneath the surface and portray those desires and drives which society, in the interests of civilization, has channeled or suppressed. People generally, who are not too much sold on being civilized anyway, see in these films a medium of temporary escape. At the same time, such films intensify our maladjustment and unconscious feelings of revolt, since on the screen we are presented with a make-believe but remarkably realistic world in which people solve their problems in ways which are socially unacceptable or morally wrong. Perhaps producers do not consciously intend it, but Hollywood films do have a content and a message. Often it’s a message which exploits and intensifies the frustration and tragedy of life. Yet, to cover up this highly lucrative exploitation of the human spirit, producers and l)ress agents shout to high heaven that what they are making is “pure entertainment.” They “simply want to make you laugh or cry.” You are supposed to enjoy the acting, direction, and sets. The content — well, that is simply incidental — the vehicle for their latest star. This type of producer propaganda has been effective. Motion picture criticism, in the columns of our newspapers and magazines, has degenerated into the most stylized and effeminate drivel about technique — acting, direction, photography. The critics and the public seem obsessed with these important but secondary aspects of a picture— the way in which it is done. They seem incapable of forming a judgment on the content of a film, or what the picture says. Their minds shy away from grappling with the deeper issues of life which, however badly or superficially portrayed, are nevertheless inherent in the stories of many of our Hollywood films. Many producers set up successful smoke screens to divert the attention of responsible elements of the American public from the content of their films — a content often designed, under the guise of giving the public what it wants, to appeal to the primitive, the brutal, and the uncontrolled. This becomes (piiti' clear even in the titling and advertising of Hollywood films. Turn to the movie page of your local paper. Titles such as A Stolen Life, Pardon My Past, They Made Me a Criminal, I Married, a Mwi derer are all cases in point. A less vicious but equally cheap appeal to public taste is indicated in the titles of such films as Hold That Blotide and that masterpiece of Hollywood alliteration Gettmg Gertie’s Garter. Everyone, I think, is familiar with the technique used in movie ads of implying that the film contains scintillating scenes of illicit love, brutality, bared emotions and seared souls. Not satisfied with appealing to such relatively normal phenomena as illicit love and the suppressed desire to kill, an attempt has been made in one recent Hollywood film to appeal to perversion, the darkest corner of the human soul. The great play which the movies have given in recent years to the “treat-’em-rough” school of heroes, who delight the heroines with their sheer brutality, is a definite appeal to the masochistic and sadistic impulses of human beings. What the movies have done in reflecting the worst in human nautre has, in turn, made human nature worse. The movies’ emphasis on brutality in love has gone fai' towai'd making masochism and sadism a