Films Facts and Forecasts (1927)

242 FILMS: FACTS AND FORECASTS presented a mask of refinement to the world. Much of this refinement still persists, and many films today reflect this attitude towards life by larding the situations with false modesty. But there is a growing tendency in most films to keep up with woman's mental development. As long as the end is moral the means are justified, and inevitably there are scenes and situations which would not have been tolerated twenty years ago. Given a director of distinction, such a film is bearable. Badly produced, it is unspeakably vulgar. The trouble at present is that we are passing through a state of transition, and the film-problem of the moment is, not that the growing freedom of expression should offend, but that the film-makers themselves may not be capable of evolving adequate treatments, or clever enough to cater for an increasingly sophisticated audience without gross suggestiveness. The development towards freer expression has advanced much further in the theatre and the novel, and has progressed unchallenged because these media appeal to a much more eclectic public than the film. Numerous plays and novels — " The Captive " and " Jew Suss,'' for example — cannot be filmed today for fear of offending the censor, who exists to protect the simpler, less mature film-goer, and many a film is deprived of wholly inoffensive incidents lest the " hick " audience should be offended. A really comic situation arose recently in Quebec, where the censors, disapproving of the illegitimate child in the American film based on Nathaniel Hawthorne's famous story, " The Scarlet Letter," insisted that Hester Prynne should be represented as a widow. It meant not a thing to them that the whole sense of the story was destroyed. Being (as an American paper put it) " dead from the neck up," the censors felt that