A hundred million movie-goers must be right... (1938)

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other main pursuits for that quality and its relation to audience consciousness. We say definitely, because later on we will learn that no confused, neutral or non-side-taking reaction to a main pursuit is permissable. In fact that kind of reaction can leave the success of a movie as isolated as an honest politician. In Street Scene the husband wanted to find out to a certainty whether or not his wife was cheating. There was nothing indeterminate or vague about his quest. His wife's caution, his neighbors' secretiveness and universal consciousness of everybody's proneness to play a little offside in the marital game, identified his pursuit beyond any doubt or question and therefore fixed the extent to which any audience would be interested^ Sympathy was of course divided between the wife and husband, but it was definitely for or against the one or the other because she was obviously not too old to satisfy his idea of love and he was too old and too dogmatic to satisfy hers. Theirs was a problem marriage, quite common, the kind that all humanity deplores : A husband in the full vigor of manhood married to an attractive female who faced certain realities of time, age and sex that men rarely give a thought; realities that women are conscious of from the moment they know the mating urge, therefore realities that are female alone. Trying to find the happiness that in a few short years she would no longer be able to command, gave the wife's affair in Street Scene tremendous appeal. Although some may have condemned, no one can say with any degree of honesty or authority that the woman was to blame. Thus we dare not assume that her affair was non-appealing. Her husband's unflexing righteousness of course threw sympathy to her, but that was provoked, not inherent. Nor can we safely assume that the husband's quest was non-appealing, just because many in the audience may have felt that he was too dictatorial or that he should have stepped gallantly aside and left the field to the other man. After all, he was preserving the integrity of his home. The only thing that we can state with any degree of certainty and agreement is that everybody in the audience was definitely in sympathy with the husband or 38