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With newspaper and trade paper polls and surveys
getting nowhere, public likes and dislikes as mysterious
*oday as they were in 1908 the industry sticks to the
Md reliables, the strongest emotion stimulants known,
omance and crime.
Consistent with their taste for meat and vegetables, *he intelligentsia and sophisticate, adult and younger feneration, city people and rural have found romance .tnd crime staple and satisfying as screen fare. And what pray is wrong with these staples? Nothing, perhaps, except the way they are prepared and served.
Although the screen dishes cooked up by Hollywood -tre pretty much of the same fiber, and highly palatable, once a year, occasionally oftener, they will turn Sut a concoction that leaves the whole public smacking ts lips for months, movies like My Man Godfrey and The Three Smart Girls, Holiday and Street Scene. And |f there are any distinctions in the preparation of romance and crime for the screen they occur in those eally great movies.
{ To understand those distinctions we should familiarize ourselves with a certain quality all great movies lave in common ; a thing called word-of -mouth. Really ^reat movies secure a maximum word-of -mouth.
Maximum word-of-mouth in a movie means that a Siovie is so entertaining the audience will go out of its Vay to recommend it to others, and not faintly praising this and that, but whole-heartedly the whole picture.
Nationwide word-of-mouth means a movie that has held thousands of audiences in an unbroken grip for 70 to 120 minutes, and set the whole nation talking And that self-advertising power dear reader, is the final test of greatness in a movie.
Not until we pause for a moment and bring other great works of art, great books and great stage plays, into direct perspective, can we appreciate the really great movie.
Stage hits and best sellers may look big to one interested in those forms of entertainment, but their sales and patronage will total less than one percent of the audience that goes ga-ga over a really great movie. It is indeed a great stage play or novel that will excite even half a million to favorable comment, let alone one
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