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PREFACE
endanger the blind cinema-going habit upon which the exhibitor depends for maintenance of his full houses. A questioning audience demanding a more mature standard of film programme would make an exhibitor's revenue far more speculative than up till now. I quote from the same American trade-journal : * Once again may it be said that the motion picture theatre is not approached by its customers as a place of controversy, of consideration, of issues, of thinking— it is a place for feeling, for emotion, and for its millions those emotions are simple, and basic, never complex. The box-office people neither study nor think about pictures. They look at them. If they like them, they say so to friends and neighbours.' * Mr. Terry Ramsaye, the author of these quotations and the editor of the journal in question, may self-appoint himself to speak for America's millions of filmgoers, but I flatly refuse on evidence to accept this appraisal of the filmgoing public in other countries including Britain. If his thesis is valid, how does he account for the phenomenal box-office success of such films as The Best Years of Our Lives, Crossfire and Gentleman's Agreement, not only in Britain but in their country of origin?
It is this kind of sweeping assessment, so common among high film executives, of the ordinary man that explains such demonstrations of intolerance and bigotry as were witnessed at the Un-American Activities investigation on certain Hollywood personalities in Washington last November.2 Opinions expressed at that sorry affair represent an attitude held by an influential section of the men who promote motion pictures and show them both in the United States and Britain.
This neurotic fear of losing their grip on the 'teen-age section of the public causes exhibitors and renters to oppose all showing of films other than for ephemeral amusement purposes, and especially to resist the development of the potentially-vast non-theatrical field. Following this is a
1 November 1, 1947.
2 Vide, Hollywood on Trial, Gordon Kahn, (Boni and Ga«er, 1948).
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