Juvenile delinquency (1955)

JUVENILE DELESTQUENCY 111 Mr. BoBO. Is it your theory, Mr, Scliary, that through the medium of motion pictures such as this that certain subjects such as this, the educational topic, the juvenile delinquency picture, can be brought to the attention of the public so that correction will be made? Mr. ScHARY. That's right. You see, in the history of motion pic- tures—I wonder if I might take a few minutes to talk about public opinion in connection with pictures. Motion pictures very seldom— and I actually don't know of any cases where they anticipate public opinion or where they lead public opinion; in the main they reflect public opinion, and in some instances accelerate public opinion. This goes all the way back to motion picture making as far back as 1915 when the first so-called controversial film ever made was a picture stimulated by Theodore Roosevelt. It was called The Battle Cry of Peace, and it was a picture designed to alert American citizens to the dangers of Kaiserism. The picture provoked a good deal of interest. I am sure very few people have seen this picture, but I very definitely remember seeing it, and it did an awful lot to excite people and alert them to Kaiserism, and did a lot to fight the fight of the rather pro- German attitude that existed in America here as late as 1916, early 1916. During the gangster era, our pictures again reflected public opinion. You remember those early gangster pictures, where the hero was mainly a young man who had come back from war, had been given a gun, had been taught how to kill, had his job taken away from him, and went into bootlegging because it was now a rather respectable business. That reflected public opinion because our attitude about the bootlegger in the early twenty's was very tolerant. He seemed to us to be kind of a nice guy. Sometimes he was our uncle or our cousin or our friend next door, and we had no feeling that he was doing any- thing highly immoral in terms of prohibition. Everybody was taking a drink whether there was a law or not, and we had a feeling that the bootlegger was a pretty nice guy, and that was reflected in our films. It wasn't until the late twenties and early thirties when the menace of what had happened to the country suddenly became apparent. We became aware of the tremendous inroads that the Capone empire had made. We were made aware by Edgar Hoover's report that this was a serious condition. It was once compared by William Valeco, a writer, as the closest thing to a true underworld empire since the days of Catiline. And the public began to react to prohibition and to the gangster and the hoodlum element. Hoover got aid from the Govern- ment in terms of the FBI. We immediately reflected that public opin- ion too because our films changed. We went into a large group of G-men pictures at the time, and the very men who had played gangsters in some of our early pictures like Ca;gney, Robinson, Paul Muni, Pat O'Brien, et cetera, now were playing G-men, and they accelerated this public antipathy toward the gangster, and they did accelerate public opinion and did create a change. This was certainly reflected by the interest the public had in those pictures. During the early days of nazism public opinion was very divided in the early thirties on the problem. Motion pictures actually did Hot deal with this subject until public opinion was quite clear about it. There were many of us in the industry who felt strongly about it, but we were not able to deal with it in terms of pictures be-